


But I was Looking at the Permanent Stars

by horsecrazy



Series: The Originals [9]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:23:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 45,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4479140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horsecrazy/pseuds/horsecrazy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All beginnings must tiptoe toward their end. 9th in an ongoing AU Originals series. Klaroline</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

There is a blow to his chest that takes all the breath from his lungs.

He tried so hard to let go and to move beyond. Death lives in such a state of impermanence for a creature like him that grief makes of itself only a very mildewed memory, faded by centuries. Hope forever has its cracks to slip through, when there will always come another year.

But oh, little brother.

You took that from him.

And he was so  _angry_ with you.

You didn't carry it to your grave, did you? You saw what happened after he threw himself against those wards and he screamed himself dumb with the only expression of anguish he understands, and then he slid down onto the floor and he put his face into his hands to pour out the one he does not, because he held you when you were very small, you know, and if in later years you did not need him, he was still supposed to put a sword to the throat of any who dared harm your bloody annoying little head.

"Kol," he tries to say to you, but sorry about that, mate, his lips do not work, his tongue has put down roots, and if it seems his first instinct is to keep between you both this distance of staircase and foyer, of elder brother, younger sister, it is only that he no longer has knees, his feet have carried themselves off, his legs have gone to puddles.

"Elijah," Kol says amicably, and breaks off a shard of the staircase.

Elijah takes this thrust half an inch to the side of the heart, and goes to his knees with his mouth open, his hand on Kol's shoulder. "For petting the wounded feelings of my murderer's sister," he says right into their brother's ear, still smiling.

He shoves Elijah face-first down the stairs.

"Bekah!" he calls out with a friendly smile, his arms out to either side, his eyebrows lifted, his hair breaking free its one uncooperative strand to flap down over his brow. "Thank you for your three crocodile tears, sister."

She presses herself out of his path, back into the banister.

Kol's foot finds the final step, his jacket settles with a quiet rustle, his arms drop to either side.

"Nik."

His brother's ashes settled for a very long time.

If you shut eyes sticky with tears and you made of your hand a shield that you might not know differently, you heard in their shifting something like snow coming to earth, and you had so  _many_ bloody memories of similar noises, of similar snowfalls, that might this just be another ragged winter upon the plains of Fredericksburg, with the powder-scorched soldiers all round you, the smoke of the cannons, the ash of the generals, because not  _him_ , you haven't even a bloody god to pray to, that you might wish him safe and swift passage to this better place the humans yammer on about, and oh, little brother-

Did it hurt?

Did you look up through your death and understand with your last moments that while most man goes alone, he was there to see the end, he would have held you through it, he should have told you sorry?

"Kol," he says just as firmly as he can manage, and if he is to take a bit of banister to the gut, if his brother has returned with only his derision and his detestation, he'll have it all, he'll swallow it whole, give to him whatever you must to balance this wobbly scale that has piled itself up against your favor.

"Nik," his brother replies, and then he smiles, just like a boy who chased him through the woods, and he leans forward to tweak his nose. "Show me to my shrine?"

* * *

She is clicking on slippery freaking totally-should-have-stolen-shoes-with-better-traction heels through the rain when her phone blurts her ring tone from the side pocket of her jacket, and she so totally shouldn't answer this, if it's not Stalky Mc _murder_ ton himself she will just  _eat_ these stupid slip n' slide soles, but she's not afraid, he tried to kill her twice, you know, it never stuck, she wasn't even wearing makeup the first time, no matter how pissed he is right now fifty twists of him around her manicured little pinkie is not just going to unravel, she has so totally got this-

"Murder your half of the city yet?" she asks brightly. "And by the way,  _no_ , I will not come home, if you're calling because Rebekah tattled just like I totally freaking  _knew_ she would. Stefan's still out here, and sorry if you were planning some romantic knight-in-shining-genocide heroics, but today it's Caroline to the rescue."

"No; there's no danger anymore," he tells her, and she has never heard such weariness in his voice.

"What do you mean? What happened with Mikael and the witches?"

"Mikael's been taken care of."

"Ok, so what's wrong with you? You sound weird." She stops for a moment to check the street, to dart across it between cars and puddles. "Are you ok? Is…everyone else ok?" she squeezes from her suddenly pinched throat, and she will not ask about Rebekah, it does not matter to her one single teeny bit what Fate has dished out to the Original Bitch, she buried Bonnie, left behind Elena, there is only Stefan, what more friendship does she  _need_ -

"Everyone's fine, Caroline."

She takes a breath, and shuts her eyes for just a moment.

She dodges a car, hops up onto the sidewalk, scurries beneath the awning of one of the shops and stands brushing wet curls from her eyes.

"Kol's alive."

Her fingers pause against her curls.

She tucks herself a little farther beneath the awning.

" _What_? How did that happen?"

"The witches were trying to reach Mikael through your friend Bonnie. To get her to lift the veil, and to free my father. She sent Kol back in his place."

She doesn't need to ask.

She has already understood what fate has given to three friends who used to play house, who shared one another's shoes, who crowded before one mirror to fix their hair, to adjust their dresses, to touch up one last dab of artificial beauty.

"Did she come with him?" she whispers.

"He's alone, Caroline."

Oh.

She knew that.

Put a smile over it, right?

She pastes on her brightest.

"How are you…dealing with that? Did you guys have yourselves a nice little bonding session, or did he, like, string you from the ceiling and play the harp on your guts? He's kind of even more randomly…stabby than you, isn't he?"

"You're getting positively morbid," he says with just a touch of pride in his voice. "I'll have to remember that harp thing."

"Well you better give credit," she scolds him, beginning to move down the sidewalk once more, her shoulders hunched against the rain, her free hand buried in her pocket.

"Oh, you can be sure if I find someone whose guts I fancy in such a state, you will be the first invited to the revelry. And I wouldn't dream of stealing your limelight."

She scoffs. "You steal  _everyone's_ limelight. Pluto's probably not a planet anymore because it was outshining you somehow."

The rain lifts itself in a veil from beneath the tires of buses.

The clouds spit out a few tentative confetti of snow.

She brushes her curls once more, checks her reflection in the shop window that passes in one long watery blur, shifts the phone to her other ear.

"Caroline. Will you come home?"

She smiles just a little into the phone. "You didn't ask nicely enough. It's Queen Caroline, to you."

She can hear the smile in his voice. "I could have told you that."

"Well then, why didn't you?"

"Well, we don't want you getting unmanageable, now do we?"

"It's not like you can manage me now. I just disobeyed the direct orders of the evilest hybrid that ever did walk this planet, and you know what he's going to do? Nothing. Because I'm cute."

"You're not doing anything for my reputation, love."

" _Please_. One blonde baby vampire does not negate a thousand years of the entire supernatural community's urge to change their pants at the merest freaking mention of your name."

"Well, that's true. I am still quite beloved by those who whisper after dark."

"Yeah, Klaus. Beloved by all of them."

"By one at least."

She slips around a woman wrestling her stroller up onto the sidewalk. "That's screaming after dark, Klaus, not whispering. And ok, next time, don't seduce me in Elijah's study, because it really honestly kinda' creeps me out when-"

A man slides out onto the sidewalk from the doorway of Prima Donna's Closet and her heels click to a halt and her mouth leaves itself wordlessly hanging against the phone and in the street everything just continues like this one moment has not tacked her feet to wet winter pavement and glued her where she stands, human in her nose, rain in her hair, the sky cracking itself just a little wider with a rumble that vibrates her down to her very toes.

"Tyler?" she whispers.

There is a long moment of silence on the other end. "Actually, my name is Klaus," he snaps.

"Right," she stutters, and out trips this nervous little laugh, fluttering up her throat, between her lips, into the only daub of white that exists in this gray, gray evening. "I saw this guy who looked like Tyler from the back and it just _completely_ startled me, because what the hell would Tyler be doing here, but he turned around, and it's not him, so, yeah, I know that sort of created a little bit of an awkward moment there for a second, but we weren't in bed, so it's not  _that_ kind of an awkward oh-my-God-let-me-just-kill-myself-now moment so it so totally could have been way worse, and I'm just going to go now, because the rain is ruining my hair, and I'm going to duck into one of the shops for a while, because if I'm having a Tresemme crisis in this weather, then there is no way Stefan isn't too, which means he's probably lurking around here somewhere doing exactly the same thing, so I'll talk to you later, bye!"

She hangs up without waiting for an answer.

The rain comes down between them.

* * *

"Well, it wasn't on a pedestal, so you lose points for that, but you did keep it- that earns you back at least a few."

Kol whips his Louisville Slugger through the air, holds it out in front of him to give it a squint, weighs its heft with a deft little toss, props it across both his shoulders and drapes his arms over either end. "What did you miss most about me, Nik?" he asks cheerfully. "My smile? The sparkle in my eyes? Or the way you always feel yourself just a bit outshone in my presence, but it's somehow all right, because you are a great appreciator of beauty and to be allowed as many looks as you like is worth a restless night grappling the same green-eyed monster Bekah fights every time someone with better hair slides to rest inside her belly?"

He opens his mouth to reply and with a point of his finger Kol cuts him off, tapping his thumbnail against the handle of his bat. "I like what you've done with the place. Not enough pictures of me, of course, but who could ever possess a collection of this face that could be considered adequate? You just can never have enough, can you?" He takes a step toward the bed of this room they used to share, swinging his bat down off his shoulders and onto the covers, his jacket following, his head twisting itself at an angle to set off a chain of firecrackers down his spine. "Death puts such a crick in your neck, Nik."

His little brother always has owned everything to which he sets foot, and if death still lies between them like something that must be bridged, if where before his brother might have leapt up into his arms, kicked his legs delicately, left behind a damp kiss on his cheek and now barely deigns to even touch him, this at least has not changed.

He sprawls back on this bed he has not set his head to in a very long time with his arms out.

What does he say, how can he throw across the first rope, is there a plank he must set down first, to span this gap that still howls with the abyss?

Do you know-

He's filled himself with the texts of a thousand years, and he still has no words for what it is to kneel on the floor beyond a brother, listening to the ash of this third and final death.

Kol pops back up and leans forward with his elbows on his knees, propping his chin in his hands, and he looks up so  _mischievously-_  he never did let the centuries weight down his childhood until all the play went from his years, he always carried with him a quip to soften a blow, a rhyme to clear the air, and if ever he abandoned you for the brother and sister he had to court, he's sorry, little brother.

He never did get the hang of this contriteness thing.

So he left it for too long, he waited until you breathed your last send-off to the tomb, as monsters are not supposed to do, and what had his guilt to do, but to flourish as untended remorse will, to sprout limbs, to grow lungs, to breathe with its own lips and to take up residence until it is no longer merely a tenant but a companion whose resentment of the ignored wields itself like a blade, and buries itself in the guts of innocent girls?

The loss of one love is very often like the loss of all.

He clasps his hands behind his back.

Perhaps you do not know this, little brother, but it's not always a stance to poke a bit of fun at this etiquette of the murderer.

Sometimes he just does not know what to do with his bloody hands.

"Congratulations on Caroline, by the way, Nik. I didn't think you'd ever run her to ground. I mean, she did see me at the bar, remember? I thought she'd never get over it."

He looks down with just a little smile, keeping his hands behind his back. "Well, death certainly hasn't instilled anything in the way of humbleness, now has it?"

"If I came back modest, would you even recognize me? You did shut me away in a coffin for almost a century, after all. The years smudge up memories a bit. Although who can forget a face like this?"

He never did say it, he can to this day hardly work it past his tongue, because what does a monster gain with apologies, not respect, not fear, power, obedience, none of the things which are supposed to be the only fuel by which he makes his way in this world, but you died, little brother, it took him like a shot, he was once peeled open by a cannon that did not hurt half so bloody much.

"I'm sorry," he blurts out.

Kol cocks his head.

"For everything I did to you. For everything…any of us did to you." He darts his tongue out to nervously taste his lips. "It wasn't a send-off befitting a Mikaelson, was it?"

His little brother's face suddenly creases without humor, quite a pained thing, it looks to be, and then he bows his head and he runs one hand over the back of his neck, fingers shaking.

He looks back up with the same smile. "It's ironic, isn't it?" He laces his hands together and points upward, keeping his fingers close to his nose. "You're the one who at least actually put your head over my grave and spit out a little grief. And you're the one apologizing." He wrinkles his nose, works his throat, looks down to the space between his boots.

"Nik," he says in a voice far too small for a clown. "Did the rest of them really hate me that much?"

He lowers himself to eye level with his brother, squatting on his heels.

He touches his fingers very gently to the brow of this boy who always followed along though he sometimes cared not upon what he trod, and he pushes his words as best he can from his thickly-clotted throat. "Of course not."

"Then why didn't they care?"

You will find that there are some things even beyond the words of linguists.

So he leans his forehead against his brother's own, and then he lifts his chin, and he fixes himself a handhold in the shoulders of his brother's shirt, and he pulls him into something that will have to do but is not close enough, and for whom the embrace is meant he is not quite sure, but they both bury themselves in it, Kol's face against his neck, his nose in Kol's hair.

* * *

He can't remember the last time Nik hugged him like this.

1045, he thinks.

They were all still somewhat human, he hadn't yet got over Mother, and there was this woman, about her age, soft eyes, softer hair, and as he ate her, he thought, do you have a son?

Does he love you very much?

And then he just bloody lost it.

Bekah and 'Lijah pried the woman gently away and took her quietly off, but it was Nik who sat down in the mud next to him, who put his arms round his shoulders and his chin on his head.

It was sort of surreal, being comforted by his mother's murderer.

But you did a good job, Nik, do you know that?

He understands that kindness was only a bit of a chink for Father to slip his fingers inside, that to show your heart is to flash your heel, but he could have used a bit more of this, just a time or two over the centuries, just when he was most empty of any confidence that if he needed a bit of a post on which to lean his shoulder he had just to tilt himself into his brother.

But it's all right.

He died.

He met a witch.

One day he'll tell you all about the last.

Bitterness is not so easily smoothed over, you don't let go all your resentments in one pious gush, but you would know better than most, Nik, about the shouldering aside of all the paler emotions in the wake of this one very bright beacon of a feeling.

So just sit with him a while, brother.

He hasn't the stomach for any solitude right now.

* * *

"What are you doing here, Tyler?" she asks, lifting one hand to the pulse beating itself up out of her throat.

He keeps his hands in his pockets and his head lowered against the rain. "I was going to ask you the same thing, but I guess now I don't need to. I came down here to see what you were doing, because what Damon told me when I went back to Mystic Falls for you had to be a bunch of bullshit- Caroline screwing Klaus? That's a load of crap. She would never betray her friends like that. That's what I told him. That's what I was so sure of, Care."

She holds the phone in her very numb hand.

"But I guess I was wrong about you and your standards. And your morals. And any little self-righteous, friends-first bullshit stance you've ever taken," he says bitterly, and then he turns on his heel and he stalks back down the street away from her, shoulders knotted beneath his jacket.

* * *

She creeps into the Mikaelson mansion on her tiptoes, but why exactly she sneaks in on an assassin's footsteps she is not sure, because from three freaking blocks down the way you can hear the jangling of the piano and what sounds like the dirge of a cat with its feet put to the blender, and to this chaos all other sounds are lost even to the ears of monsters.

Rebekah is leaning against the shattered banister at the base of the stairs, her head cocked.

"What happened here? And what the  _hell_ is that noise?"

"Our brother Kol's back. He's a bit put out with Elijah. And me," she says softly, and then the haughtiness returns to her voice, and she clears her throat to inject it with just the right amount of bitch. "That would be the sound of the two idiots' drunken carousing."

"Is that Klaus  _singing_?"

"If you can call it that. You won't hear it very often, thank God. He has to be very drunk; I've only ever seen Kol stir him up like this. They drink a lot of bourbon, break some things, shout nasty sea shanties at the tops of their lungs, and think they're just absolutely hilarious, while the rest of us pray for sudden deafness."

She feels her face relax just a little from the shock that has frozen her cheeks and her lips, because he curled up next to her so  _lost_ , on that bed where he didn't know how to grieve, and if he has committed more than enough sins to justify sorrow, it still gave her a boot to the chest, to watch him wrestle this very human sadness for his brother who was loved and lost too soon, as are all family and friends born to creatures with centuries in anchors around their ankles.

He sounds horrible.

He sounds happy.

She would have told you once upon a time that stories are for heroes, that monsters are to be vanquished, that what counts is not the dragon guarding its tower but the princess locked away in her prison, that beasts are for swords and witches for river barrels.

She would have told you that.

But the glass slipper doesn't fit her anymore, you know?

She grew claws and she sprouted teeth and what lurks beneath the skin of a girl is the kind of hide that does not belong in the archives of happily-ever-afters, but sometimes there are stories to be had in all the spaces between scales.

So what she does, as she stands at the base of these stairs listening to this monster who bore his brother's loss just like any human with his noble mission and his pure white steed, is she folds her hands together and she presses them back against her lips, and she smiles behind this little shield, because maybe she shed her own happily-ever-after when she died alone and gasping beneath her pillow, but she didn't lose everything to bloodlust and birthdays.

She loves him, and he's happy.

You who have glutted yourself on the parables of princes will never believe it of the guarders of the gates, but it's enough, you know?

Even for a monster.

"Are you going to go up there?" Rebekah asks, turning to look over her shoulder.

"No way. I don't want any up-close-and-personal exposure to that," she says with the smile that has always gotten her through, and then she pivots on her heel and she makes her way back out into the rain where she stands for a very long time, staring down at her phone.

Bonnie.

She's not going to say she's not glad for him.

But couldn't you have snuck your way through?

Please?

She's only got one friend left, you know, and God that is so seriously  _selfish_ of her, to make your death about her own pain and her sleepless staring nights, because what about all that  _time_ you forfeited when she will go on to never age a day in Egyptian sands or Irish fogs, what about the children and the grandchildren you would have loved all the way to their premature demises of carefully-cultivated moss and stone, but she can't help it, Bon.

There's a hole.

She'll probably never fill it.

But up, forward, out, right?

When you have set before you a million, gazillion years, you do not shackle yourself to years past and griefs that are meant to grow stale, you keep your chin up, your feet moving, your head straight, and you just forge onward.

So she stares down at her phone and with a sudden dart of her thumb she deletes your contact with eyes that she is just positive are blinded by rain, and then with a little hiccup she smears mascara across her cheeks with the sleeve of her jacket, and she doesn't mean for it to happen, it's just that she's so  _lonely_ , a blood bag is not company, an alleyway cat not a conversationalist, so she sits on a bench next to a man in homeless rags, and she tells him about her friend Bonnie, who made her a charm bracelet in fourth grade, who wore it all through sixth, who loved hard, who deserved more, and then she sets her teeth upon him and she drinks until she forgets and he dies.

She's sorry, afterward.

Is that how it's going to be, Mommy?

She will spend her centuries endlessly apologizing, until one day she does not.

* * *

She peeks in on her brothers when the house has at last fallen silent, and for a moment she can only stand in the doorway, watching them.

Kol has got his arm flung over Nik's back, his mouth open on a snore.

Nik is drooling into his hair.

Her brothers: the most feared supernatural creatures in all of creation.

She won't tell you that she feels a pang like a mother's in her very barren body, that Kol's stupid bloody  _face_  sets off a spark to burn her throat, to water her eyes, that if she could slide between them both, rest her head on Nik's chest, roll over to burrow her nose against Kol's, she might sleep her first undisturbed slumber in years.

For what would she be, without her denials and her claws?

But she takes the blanket bunched up at their feet, and though they do not need it, she pulls it up over them both, she very carefully smoothes a piece of hair from Kol's eyes and she pats down a wayward curl of Nik's, and for a few moments she just sits at the end of their bed, consoling herself with the movements of their chests.

* * *

Tyler's appearance is just one brief blot in this routine she carefully schedules each day, now you see it, now you don't, and so she carries on like it never happened, like he did not shrink her down half a shamed foot with only his eyes, she keeps her smile perky, her demands sharp, she goes from hotel to hotel and shop to shop with her notes organized, her hair perfect, until one day Fate, like the bitch always does just when you are running so _freaking_ smoothly Proactiv commercials could so totally not Photoshop you anymore flawless, rears up to backhand her nasty slut hand across her face.

She is midway through compelling Dan Keats when the door jingles behind her, inhales a blast of southern December, clicks itself shut once more.

"Caroline, right?" a voice calls out behind her.

"And I wasn't here, and you have never heard the name Klaus before, you spent all day balancing your checkbook or counting your receipts or whatever people do when they can't magically sweet talk people into giving them their most expensive and prettiest underwear. Ok?"

She turns around slowly.

"Yeah, that's Klaus' little bitch."

" _Excuse_ me? If anything, he's  _my_ little bitch. Who are you? Not that I really care. I just need a name, for the condolences I'm going to have to send to your family." She smiles fakely, and crosses her arms.

The door jingles again, and into the nearly-empty lobby spill three more men in winter jackets, their hearts beating the familiar accelerated tattoo of the monster, and now in her veins her blood goes to ice, her heart flips over and dies a second death, her mean-girl bravado ties itself into knots inside her throat.

"Told you I saw her turn in here. Marcel thought she might be pulling shit like this. Don't kill her; might as well find out what she knows before we take her back to him," the man nearest the door says, and then in an instant he is before her, his hand around her neck, his superior strength bearing her back against the desk Dan cowers behind with a startled cry, wood digging into her spine, papers skittering and slipping beneath her frantically groping hands, the floor leaving her toes, the ceiling going indistinct, everything thundering through her, blood, nerves, adrenaline, oh God, if she could just get a little  _leverage_ -

There is a sudden shape behind the man, a smudge of black she does not understand, and then for just a second his fingers loosen, the ceiling clears, she feels beneath her flailing toes the reassuring hint of the floor tiles.

A hand makes its way back out of the man's jacket pocket and with a fancy flourish spins the gun it unearths butt-first toward her. "Oh, look what I found. Do you want it, darling?"

The hand at her throat becomes a vise once more, heaves her up, scatters the papers, blurs the ceiling, lifts her straining toes beyond this one little reassuring anchor of lemon-scented tile, telescopes the gun into this one little teeny dot upon this island of a palm, so freaking far away, but she pushes off the desk, she lurches her hand vaguely in the direction of this gleaming metal she can smell if not quite see, she gets her fingers around the handle, fumbles the barrel into his stomach, pulls the trigger twice.

She drops to the floor wheezing.

"Very good, darling," the voice tells her, and then a pair of hands on her shoulders turns her gently toward the next, and she raises the gun in front of her still-swimming eyes, she fires in that blind panic of the soldier with the machine guns rattling over his head and the bombs raining gas because oh  _God_ she can't  _see_ her throat is still compressed, her sweat ruins her aim, there is someone still  _behind_ her-

An arm loops her throat, a chest presses her back, and she hammers back with her elbow, she thrusts her head into what she hopes is a nose and is only a chin, but it snaps him back anyway, it staggers him just long enough off balance that with her orientation returning in bright white stars she spins, and she puts the barrel to his head, she spreads him in a hot red shower all over the formerly white wall, her breath rattling in her throat.

Kol Mikaelson grabs the outstretched wrist of the man aiming his own gun at her, flips him easily, catches his gun, crushes his head, looks up with a smile that is so totally  _freakily_ reminiscent of his brother. "Give me your gun."

" _What_?"

"Toss me your gun, darling," he says, and holds out his hand.

She lobs it to him as the final two charge him from the sides, and with a wink he crosses one arm over the other, and he fires both pistols simultaneously, his eyes never leaving hers, and now with a bullet to either head both men jerk and topple backward, smoking from the forehead.

"I'm amazing. You just don't see that every day."

She stands for a moment regaining her breath as he lowers the guns, one hand to her chest, the other to her forehead, and does every Mikaelson have to be such a big stupid smug look-at-me-look-at-me  _jerk_?

"Hello!" she snaps. "You couldn't have helped me a little earlier?"

"Now why would I want to do that? Then I'd have to go back home and tell Nik that you need me to step in and sweep you off your damsel feet, and then he'll lock you in a tower because damsels are not supposed to be let out into the light -they're very delicate, you know- which would be quite a shame, because I like you. You're very mean to him. Also, if I'd stepped in earlier, I wouldn't have had two guns, and while you still would have been very impressed with me, you would have missed out on that. Which would have been a shame."

"What are you even doing here? I don't even know you."

"I followed you. The stalker doesn't fall far from the family tree. And I'll introduce myself the same way I do every morning to my looking glass: Mirror, mirror on the wall, Kol is the handsomest of them all. That's the most important place to start, isn't it? Anyway, darling, Kol Mikaelson, the brother you would have fallen for if we'd met first. As it is, you're probably still going to have to put up quite a struggle to resist me, but for both our sakes, I think it's best if you do. Nik doesn't share very well. I'm sure you've noticed." He smiles amicably, and points one of the guns butt-first at her. "You haven't been around the house very much, since I've been back. I think you and I need some time to chat."

* * *

He takes Caroline Forbes to a pub down the street, and he smiles as he sets foot inside, because it's not the same one, of course, that one's long cocked up its toes and gone to its dignified death beneath the foundations of sturdier shacks, but it's quite nice, very traditional.

He frequented a pub like this quite a lot, back in 1915.

He wondered, when he first rose from his second death and he shook off the arthritis of a centurial sleep, what happened to the boy he left behind in a church, if ever he made it across the sea to his wet green homeland, if he found himself on the wrong end of a hunter's stake, where he moved on to, who he fell hard for, if in 97 years he managed to brush off that brief dalliance of his early years.

Death takes a bit of the edge off a connection like that, but he took quite a long time, to loosen his hold on his memories of those several long months as he drifted about in his own mind, knocking round in the dark

Then he supposes 'dalliance' isn't quite the right word at all, now is it?

He always has to let go the ones to whom he is most attached.

He's getting rather tired of that.

Caroline smiles her way through the bartender's request for ID, her pupils wide, takes whatever swill it is he slops into her glass, and makes her way toward one of the booths in the back, slapping aside a drunk's too-friendly hand.

He slides in across from her.

"Does Klaus know you're here?" she wants to know, leaving the drink untouched on the table.

"Nik doesn't have anything to do with this. I'm not on his leash."

"So…why did you want to talk to me?"

"What privileged white male of the twenty-first century wouldn't use his imbalanced power dynamic to force his attentions on a pretty young woman?" He smiles and laces his hands on the table. "I've been reading something called 'tumblr' lately."

"So you stalked me for…however long you've been following me, so you could hit on me? Your brother will put you back on the Other Side himself."

"Nik won't do anything permanent to me. He just got me back. You'll learn very quickly that everyone wants to keep me around."

That's not true, of course, darling, but he does a very good impression of it, doesn't he?

He leans intimately forward.

Caroline slides herself just a little bit back.

"Your friend Bonnie got me out. Did Nik tell you that?"

She clears her throat, and looks down for a very long time at the hands she folds between them. "Yeah. He did."

He doesn't know exactly where to start.

He just wanted-

He wanted someone who knew her too.

But now, isn't it funny, he's not even sure what to say.

That doesn't happen to him very often.

"Can I ask you something?" she says, looking up from her hands to train her eyes a bit too steadily on his face. "Was she…was she ok? I mean, I'm not going to ask if she was happy, she's  _dead_ , but did she…did you talk to her a lot- did she find Jeremy, or her grams, or anyone? Was she lonely?"

Actually, darling, you might be surprised to know that she had one constant companion, that he rarely left her side, that if she spent most of her time annoyed at least she was not alone.

You wouldn't know it by looking at him, would you?

That he tucks away quite a lot beneath his smirk? That he was dead, he let some of it hang loose, he didn't mind his feelings nearly so well as he should have, because what he forgot to remember is how very permanent he is, and perhaps he thought that was over, perhaps he discovered at last something to strike him down, to crumble him alongside stricken mountains and flood-swept villages, perhaps he was at last to lay his head to rest in that grave he and Nik dug once a very long time ago, for a boy who never got his final rites, but he is forever, darling, truly.

His loves, his laughs, his links.

He will never make them last.

"She wasn't lonely."

Caroline smiles, her eyes shiny. "So she sent you back, in place of Mikael?"

"Not really. Some of the witches here were trying to resurrect Mikael through her, to force her to drop the veil and let him through. She had to seal it off to keep him on the Other Side. She could have sealed it off with me there; I think she just wanted to get rid of me. Your friend has very bad taste," he says with a smile he does not mean.

"Wait- she just…sent you back? It wasn't part of the spell?"

"No. Why?"

"Because Bonnie  _hates_ vampires! And you are like the absolute worst of them- she wouldn't inflict you on a whole innocent population just to get rid of you." She unhinges her jaw, and he quite sees the appeal of pretty little Caroline, if you know what he means, Nik. "Oh my God! Did you two  _do_ something?"

"What kind of something? Be very specific. Maybe draw on an experience or two of your own."

"Eww. But oh my God, you had a  _thing_ with her, didn't you? With  _Bonnie_? Oh my God, I have got to tell Elena," she blurts out, and then she stops herself, and a little spasm runs itself through her face, and just that suddenly, her amusements are over.

He swallows down the rather large something that has got itself stuck in his throat. "You don't think she would have sent me back?"

"No. Not just because you annoyed her. Bonnie would have kept you there, you know, where it was safest for the human population at large."

* * *

"Do you think she liked me?" Kol asks her with such a stricken look on his face, and seriously just freaking help her, because are you all this human, beneath your hides?

She doesn't need any more of the Original family inching its way underneath her skin.

But she makes her voice into something very gentle, when she replies. "I think she probably must have."

* * *

Tim is leaning across Klaus' desk when she barges loudly inside one afternoon, both their eyes on some paper, Klaus barely looking up as he drags his finger through the curve of a road, Tim not even casting a look back over his shoulder, twirling his stupid little hat on one hand, his other just way too seriously close to Klaus' own, his sleeves rolled up to reveal two forearms that might actually be kind of nice, if he weren't a two-faced weasly little _slutbag_ of a man-stealer.

She drops right into Klaus' lap, and hooks one arm around his neck, lowering the other to cup his knee possessively.

"Caroline," he says, and do you want to know who that little so-happy-to-see-you-light-of-my-black-and-shriveled-soul-every-minute-is-just-a-countdown-to-the-next-time-we-touch tone of his is for?

Not you.

Tim stands up.

She cuts him a frosty look.

"He's got three bodyguards; one human, two vampires. Car's not armored."

"Well, even an armored car shouldn't be much of a hindrance, to our kind. Does make it a touch easier, though," Klaus replies.

"Hurts like a fookin'-" Tim shifts his eyes over to her and clears his throat. "Sorry."

"Now, see- isn't that true appreciation for a lady? You just don't get manners like this very often anymore, Caroline." He drops a hand to the one she has clamped around his knee, and laces their fingers together. "If you corner him in this alley behind Big Daddy's-"

"Big Daddy's?" she interrupts, arching an eyebrow.

"It's a strip club, love. A favorite with the mayor of this fair city. We're kidnapping him tonight."

"What?"

"He's under Marcel's control," Tim says quietly.

Klaus lifts her hand to kiss her wrist. "Speaking of Marcel, sweetheart, anymore run-ins with over-friendly minions of his?"

"Nope. Smooth sailing today."

"Good. I wouldn't want to have to get my hands dirty, ripping off heads."

"You love getting your hands dirty."

"Only with certain favorite nubile blonde vampires," he says, flashing his dimples. "Anyway, Tim- you block that alleyway and you ought to be able to take him without much of a fuss. Witnesses should be minimal. And eliminated, of course. He always parks out back of the club; there's a 'No Parking' sign precisely where he leaves his car, because of course politicians are never beholden to their own laws."

"The two vamps he's got with him are supposed to be about two and three hundred years old." Tim rubs his chin, gives another spin of his hat.

"All right. Nothing too difficult for you to overcome, then. Take Jason and Charise with you. I've got Mark on a bit of reconnaissance tonight, so I'm afraid he won't be able to make the party. It should be quite manageable, between the three of you. Use the guns. We wouldn't want Marcel to get any ideas about the werewolves suddenly throwing down their arms. Get him to the Blue Nile. We'll let him stew for a bit, while Marcel turns his eye elsewhere. He's got quite a lot of compulsion to be put through, anyway. It's going to take a while, for me to both extract and to implant information. He's not going to find it terribly pleasant, I'm afraid."

"He'll be there," Tim says, and flips his hat back up onto his head.

"I know he will. Have fun, Tim."

"Yeah," Tim replies shortly, and he cuts one last look to her and then he vanishes into the hall, turning down his sleeves as he goes.

"Does he do that just for you, or something?"

"What?"

"Roll up his sleeves so his rippling, thieving slut forearms are on display for all to enjoy? And by that I mean you."

Klaus presses his lips to her wrist again, laughing against it. "He's just a fidgety little thing, Caroline. They'll be back up before he reaches the door." He leans in to touch his forehead to her own, his dimples deepening. "But if you wanted to do something about perhaps, marking your property…"

"Oh really? Like what?" she asks innocently as he slides a hand up along her thigh, underneath her skirt.

"I'll let your imagination fill in the blanks."

"You don't want to do that."

"Oh don't I?"

"No. Because you'll wake up with 'Property of Caroline Forbes' tattooed on your forehead."

"Why don't you carve it into my back?" he says right into her ear, and then he slams her down onto the desk, and he licks up both her thighs.

* * *

He eases the little Honda he has picked up from some lazy owner on the street corner (6:00 at night on Bourbon St., who in their right fuckin' mind leaves their bleedin' keys in the ignition) right in behind the mayor's SUV with its white blaze of governmental plates, and he kills the engine.

In the backseat, Charise and Jason lay themselves down side by side, and set to work screwing their suppressors onto their pistols.

He slams the door.

"You can't park there," the cop approaching at a jog calls out to him, and he halts the man with a pat on his shoulder and a brief look into his eyes, and the officer walks away in a glaze, ticket book creeping back into his pocket.

He exhales one thin white breath into the sky.

Nice night.

The bloodiest ones always are.

* * *

Bourbon St. crunches beneath his boots, each of his steps going off like a gunshot, this sandwich of ice and pavement giving beneath his feet at last, he never had that on the Other Side you know, bit of a novelty, and what a jab the sky gives him with its one-two of cold breeze and thin snowflake, it's actually quite nice, he could pass a whole night in it.

But.

Places to be, things to see.

Innocents to murder.

You know how it goes, don't you, darling?

* * *

Two humans on his right, just beyond the alleyway, drunk, overly-perfumed, Christ on a cross, have you got to fuckin' bathe in that shit; one vampire, not far behind them, their boots like gunshots, some sort of jacket flapping in the breeze; a surge of techno from the ttity club, the squealing of the dancer's hands round the pole, all right, deep breath, boyo, steady on the gun, you remember Irish fields to the belly, the distant stars of the British artillery, the dust of rattling tenders-

This isn't fuckin' nothing.

He takes a deep breath.

He shuts his eyes, just for a moment, and then he looks over his shoulder from where he has crammed all 6' 3" of himself across passenger and driver's seat, his knees bent, his boots propped against the driver's door, pistol sweaty in his hand, cap lost somewhere down the side of the seat, the breathing of three monsters in this tiny cramped space thunderous as the bass of the club vibrating just three feet away.

Jason lifts his eyebrow.

Charise fiddles with her suppressor.

He flicks his eyes back to the roof of the car.

* * *

Big Daddy's.

That's quite a moniker.

He'll have to check it out sometime.

He's sure you haven't the slightest idea of what 'big' truly is, darlings.

He puts his hands in his pockets, and he does not hunch his shoulders against the few bits of snow that land themselves on his back, he actually cozies right up to this wet winter sensation, because you just don't fire off the nerves like that, when you're dead, and he walks past this dazzling house of sin with just a little side glance of his eyes.

Someone's going to have themselves quite the parking ticket on their hands when they're done with all their nightly aberrations.

* * *

He clicks the pocket watch open against his chest and cranes his neck down to look at it.

He licks his lips.

His Ma would have him cross himself, but he's pretty sure he long ago forfeited the rights to his Catholic comforts, because what doors are there open to the footsteps of monsters, Ma?

Jason shifts.

Charise gives her magazine a final tap to seat it.

The back door opens.

* * *

He slips between a stumbling human couple, cuts through an empty parking garage, blurs himself one block over, another up, all the way to the 700th section of Bourbon, to the shop outlined in festive red lights.

He gives the sign a little tap with his fingers as he lets himself in through the door, and what a skip there is in his step, darling.

* * *

He kicks open the door, blurs himself up onto the top of the car, shoots the human, wounds the mayor, flips himself back over the side of the Honda and onto the pavement as Charise sits up, flings open the door, spits two quiet rounds into the chest of the first vampire.

"Shit!" she snaps. "Tim!"

There is another officer across the street, his cruiser drawn to an abrupt halt, his lights going, one hand on his gun as he sprints across the walkway, and with an under-the-breath "Fuck!" he shoots the man between the eyes and watches him taken off his feet by this sudden death, his pistol clattering in the street. "Fuck me. Where's the mayor?"

"Second guard took off with him," Jason says, leaning his hip back against the open back door of the Honda.

He presses the heel of his hand into his eyes. " _Fuck_. All right, Jason, you stay behind, compel any more officers who show up, make sure they just so happen to mix up our faces with someone else's; Charise, you take that side of the street, cover the rest of the block, I'll go up to the 600 addresses, then hit the 700 block. You finish up here, and if you don't find anything, get down to the 400s."

"Somebody's getting killed for this," she mutters sourly.

"Not if we run him down," he says, and slips his gun into the pocket of his vest.

* * *

Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo is quite cozy, if you ask him.

Needs a bit more warmth to it, though. Shame on those little slithers of brisk December air, making their way in through the cracks of the shutters and the maw of the door.

"Are you Christine?" he asks the woman behind the counter, who looks up from her magazine with a polite smile.

"Yeah. Can I help you find something?"

Well it's not really a what, it's a who, but thank you very much, darling, for your good manners. You just don't find those much anymore, do you know what he means?

He bounces the woman's face off the counter, yanks her over it and onto the floor, takes the lighter from his pocket and sets it to the display of voodoo dolls dangling from the wall behind the register.

He thrusts his hand inside her chest to the wrist, and pins her to the floor. "Not a single hint of a spell, darling, or I pop your heart right out of your chest. I need you to put me in touch with a friend from the Other Side."

* * *

He catches the scent of spilled blood and human sweat just five buildings up, and he leaps nimbly onto an alleyway dumpster, runs up the wall of the building it lies flushe against, swings himself over the lip of the roof and onto the tile, to track it from above.

* * *

"I  _can't_!" she screams.

"Of course you can, darling. It's not like you have a shop to look after anymore, do you? Anyway, this isn't even terribly taxing; you and your friends have already done it once, so all I need you to do is reach across the veil and poke yourselves through to Bonnie Bennett."

"We can't do that anymore!" the woman sobs, trying to control her breaths, to keep her lips down out of the smoke. "Something's wrong with the veil."

"I know. I was there. She sealed it off."

"Well we can't get through anymore. We  _tried_. We've been trying to resurrect Mikael; we can't even talk to our ancestors, any of them. We can't talk to any of the witches on the Other Side."

"You're not telling me I pinched my brother's file on you for nothing, are you?"

"I can't help you. Just let me go," she wails, her tears shining on her cheeks.

"All right. How about I make a deal with you."

He drags her to the doorway, her heart in one hand, his lighter in the other.

* * *

He keeps himself at a light jog as he runs, pacing himself just slightly off the mayor and his guard, leaping from one rooftop to the next, timing his footsteps with the streaming of the shoppers, matching breath to step, step to breath, vest flapping around his ribs, snow stinging through his sleeves, gun bouncing in his pocket.

* * *

"All right, here we go."

He shoulders open the door of the shop to the left of the Voodoo House, jerks her in behind him to the screams of all the patrons, blood black on her chin and sticky on her breasts, lighter still in his hand, and now he sets fire to the large Christmas tree at the front of the store, topples it with a kick into the backs of stampeding customers, heaves onto this flaming decoration a piece from the wicker patio furniture display to his left, calls through the open door to the man who brakes with screeching tires and hanging mouth in the street outside.

"Could you drive your truck up here? Yes, just bump it up onto the sidewalk and through the door here, thank you, darling. We wouldn't want anyone leaving the party prematurely."

He yanks the screaming witch out of the way.

The man crashes through the entryway with a terrific bang and slumps over at his wheel.

* * *

The mayor stops to take a sip from the wrist of his protector.

He leaps the edge of the roof.

* * *

"I wonder how much of the French Quarter I'm going to have to destroy? What do you think?"

He kicks in another door. "What shall we do here?"

The owner ducks down behind his counter, comes up holding a shotgun, reels back as this weapon is wrenched from his hands, takes two barrels straight to the face.

Oh well.

He wasn't very handsome anyway.

* * *

You go in low first, take him by surprise, put a boot through his escape, a permanent cripple for the human, a temporary set-back for the monster, but for both are they sent to their knees, and now with the bodyguard's leg in shards, he wrenches his head back by the hair, shoves his barrel in hard enough to chip the man's teeth, fires one stifled round through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.

He grabs the mayor by the arm.

* * *

"Still nothing, darling? You know how to stop this."

"I  _can't_! Please, just stop! We can't do  _anything_. The veil's gone- we can't even feel it anymore. It's not that we can't just take it down, if we're not from the Bennett line, we can't even  _sense_ it anymore. There's no communicating with the spirits. There's no bringing anyone back, not anymore. We're completely shut off from the Other Side."

He feels one sharp pang, but one is all you need, isn't it, when it reaches this far down inside?

Bonnie.

What have you done? Didn't you want to leave for yourself even one small gap?

Couldn't you have told him, before you sealed yourself off to this fate of the tomb, what you were going to do, that it cannot be taken back, that if ever he wants to see you once again, he must lay down in his fourth and final grave and take another stake to the back while on this side of the living there is at least one brother who loves him yet, who will cry to see him go?

"I think you're not trying hard enough," he says thickly as the sirens begin to swell in the streets.

* * *

Klaus leaves her in the bed as his phone begins to ring from the dresser, planting three last kisses on her chin, her neck, her shoulder and rising with his jeans still unbuttoned, she in just her panties, both of them slick with satiation.

"What?" he says into the receiver, doing up his pants one-handed. "And did you see who it was? Did you recognize him?"

"No," she hears Tim say as she props herself up against the pillows, pulling her curls down over her breasts.

He flicks his eyes back toward her, and rubs a hand down the three-day growth on his chin. "All right. I'll take care of it."

He hangs up. "Elijah!" he calls into the hall, tossing her his shirt as he turns to block the doorway with his shoulders, stretching himself out to fill the whole thing, the muscles in his back knotting beneath his healing scratches. "Where is Kol, brother?"

* * *

He throws the witch heartless into the arms of the first responders, his hand glistening with its leftovers.

He crushes it with a smile and pours its sludge between his fingers.

They swarm round behind the open doors of their cars, to take their cover carefully, to prepare their aim, to prime their courage, to make their silent peace.

He wonders-

Is that what she did, while she stood facing him with her smile just a bit brighter than his own, her fingers shaking where they lay, her shoulders set against her fate?

"Put your hands in the air!"

Actually, he doesn't think so.

That's not very interesting, is it?

Who wants the easy resolution, after all, darlings, your stories tied up in pretty ribbons and string? Did you ever clap that book to your heart and watch with lover's eyes it gather dust and time on your shelf?

He didn't think so.

* * *

"Niklaus, I will settle this."

"He hasn't been back a bloody  _week_ -"

"I said I'll take care of it, brother. Without the complications your presence would likely inflict on the Quarter."

They stare one another down for a very long charged moment, the blood thundering between them all.

She hugs Klaus' shirt around her ribs, rocks nervously up onto her toes, settles back down on her heels.

"Niklaus."

He looks back over his shoulder to find her eyes, to hold them fast, to sigh his reluctant resignation. "Fine, Elijah. Go corral our brother. And then bring him back here for a little chat, about the rules we follow in my city."

* * *

They open fire.

He's stood before a lot of onslaughts such as these.

Do you think these little stingers will put him on his knees before you, that like all other dissidents he will fall to your authority, to lie in a puddle of your red superiority?

He smiles.

He walks casually, with his hands in his pockets, his jacket collecting punctures, his chest leaking, his cheeks pockmarked, but do you know, darlings- he's got a lot of holes in him.

He always survives them.

In fact, not long ago, an uppity human like yourselves put him away in the ground for what seemed an eternity, and there he lay pinned by a witch whose eyes sometimes promised him more, and yet here he stands.

Isn't that a nice story?

This one's not going to be quite so pretty.

You will shit yourself as it ends.

You will lie beside your partner with your head in his lap as he was not allowed to seek comfort in his own brother, and you may get a few final words, as he did not, and a community will mourn, as all communities lament their public defenders, but you will shit yourself.

Isn't that a way to close out your one pitiful life, in a puddle of blood and bowel?

He leaps up onto the hood of the first cruiser.

He wrenches the shotgun from the hands of the officer who tips himself onto his back to realign his aim, and he blows the man's face to pieces against his pale-cheeked partner, and now as this man swings his pistol in one last panicked effort, he clubs him with the butt of the shotgun, pins him back against the pavement, bends down to empty his throat in one swift strike.

Someone screams, the sirens or the playthings, he is not sure, everything is merely background noise, he filters it all through his only half-listening ears as he cuts a swathe through New Orleans' finest, one witch dead behind him, another below him (or is it to the side of him- he never was precisely sure of the proportions of this other dimension, up is down, down is up, who cares, darling, you're dead).

You're dead.

And he is not.

He snaps a uniformed arm, spits the forehead of this screaming officer on the shiny hood ornament of his car, takes a bullet to the heart, another to the throat, shrugs these off as he does so many other things you will never be able to flinch so neatly aside, tosses these toys through the air to meet their noisy ends in the windows of nearby shops.

Do you know, he thinks-

He thinks he thought there was always going to come a day when he fostered within himself a bit of hope.

Things just  _last_ , Bonnie- not sands or seas or even the shores they beat upon, but when the next crisis of nature wipes from the planet the humans and their ant hives, there will still be  _him_.

And you.

For a while, you were permanent right alongside him.

But these men aren't.

He breaks the spine of one, severs the head of another, dodges the bullet of this last stander with her shaking hands and her fruitless cries for back-up, breaks each of her wrists, kicks her chin so hard it vomits bits of bone and teeth as she flies.

He slams her head in the door of the cruiser she tries to take as her refuge.

All around him the shops empty out and the streets fill with the stumbling panic of beasts, and just listen to their bleating- do you see why he eats them?

Do you drop a bit of damp grief over the stupidity of cows shuffling along to their slaughter?

He hears the screeching of more tires, rising sirens, the crackling of Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo, his blood beating in his ears, the officer's creeping in the streets, and he waits patiently, standing in the lights of the cars, checking the magazine of the Glock he pulls from the holster of the nearest body.

He fires one rapid stream into the windshield of that first white nose flying to the rescue, and the car veers through pedestrians, past a fire hydrant, into the window of the nearest shop.

He blurs himself all the way over to the trunk, hops up onto it, slides himself over the roof and down onto the hood, fires two into the head of the officer who throws wide the passenger door and tries to crawl to safety.

The driver slithers awkwardly from his seat, coughing blood, his hand fumbling with the door, his panic positively delicious.

He tears the door from its hinges.

He drops his fangs, and for a moment he just listens to the man scream and piss and cry.

The noisiest ones are always the most fun.

He picks him up by the collar of his uniform and thrusts his neck down neatly onto the last clinging shards of the shattered window, leaving him to bubble his last breaths and shit his final meals, the patrons screaming from their tables.

There are three toward the front, two men, one woman, isn't that kinky, humans are such hungry things, aren't they, and into each of them he empties the last of his magazine.

Do you want to know why?

Why not?

That's all.

Why not.

You are all  _whims_ , you'll never  _last_ , do you know who's always still going to be here-  _him_ , not you, it will always just be  _him_ , that's the always and forever, not brotherhood or bonds or sisters with their claws and sharpened tongues, just some spry old man and his time, he bloody  _knows that_ , Bonnie.

He knows that.

He thought he did.

But he felt that one very sharp pang, all the way through him.

"Kol," Elijah says from behind him, and the pang is sharper still, because do you know who wept for him?

Nik.

That's all.

Nik, and maybe a girl who sent him back, who did not pry him free but gently let him go, stinging as she let loose both their fingers?

Maybe?

"What is the reason for this, Kol?" his brother wants to know, and he doesn't turn round.

You can keep the cheek in your voice if not in your face.

"What do you mean, Elijah? Don't you think this is funny?"

"No," he says, and the window crunches beneath his brother's shoes. "And neither do you. I am not Niklaus, Kol. My anger does not blind me."

Do you want to know what else blinded Nik, Elijah?

Grief.

You couldn't relate.

He lets the restaurant drain itself of customers.

"What were you hoping to accomplish? To bring her back?"

He does turn now, gun still in his hand, fangs denting his lip, blood catching in his stubble, and there stands his brother, pillar of morality, isn't he, there on the window sill like the angel alighting his perch, flawless suit, hair, face, not a strand of him out of place, here to brush away the spills of his worst and youngest brother.

"Niklaus and Caroline talk nearly as loudly as they…partake in other activities," he says with just the faintest creasing of his face. "You stole one of Niklaus' files. You left a witch dead in the street. You did not put anything past me as a child, brother; you will not do so now."

He wipes his face.

He lets his fangs retract.

"I don't think you'd understand, actually, Elijah," he says, smiling with just his lips. "So piss off."

"Do you think, Kol, that I don't know what it is, to have loved and lost?"

"I don't think you care what it is, for me to have loved and lost. It's just me, after all, isn't it, Elijah? You had Nik. You had Bekah. What were me and Finn, after all, but a bit of extra baggage?"

There is a very silent moment, for a night full of the screams of machine and human throats alike.

"There is a great responsibility on the shoulders of eldest siblings who do not have parents. Sometimes there is no room for their grief. It doesn't mean they do not feel it."

Nik was right, you know.

Big brothers often are.

This eldest sibling of theirs is a man of unspeakable eloquence.

But he didn't expect this.

He's had a lot of practice, holding himself together.

But Elijah looks down at him from his height of the deity, and he looks very much like he means this very human emotion that leaks through just slightly to his voice, and so he sits down on the carpet of this empty room, and he bursts into tears.

You forget what it feels like, after a while, grief.

But you never forget how to do it.

Don't tell Nik?

He was supposed to take it like a man.

That's how he kept up, you know.

"Kol," his brother says gently, and he forgets, sometimes, that Nik is not the only one who used to make of his voice a caress for all the hurts of his youngest siblings.

"I just wanted her back, Elijah."

"And do you think you could have truly been happy, you and this witch? On this side of the veil, where her morality would not have been sieved through her death? Once she saw you in your true element?"

He looks down at the hands he laces between his knees, and hiccups. "Maybe I just thought she deserved to come back. For her."

He's not Nik.

Not everything is about him.

Most things aren't about him, actually.

But you know that, Elijah. You practiced it quite neatly yourself.

"Kol," his brother says even more gently, and he wipes his eyes and he presses the heel of one hand very hard into the socket of his right eye, and he does not look up.

He must have had a very lot pent up in him, perhaps nine hundred years worth, because he sits here for a long time, coughing up all the things that go with grief, all the soggy little pieces of good-bye.

"Let me take you home," his brother says when he has finished at last, and if Elijah has not always loved him as he needed, still his voice is kind, it strikes right home, it tells him here is somewhere to go.

So he wipes his eyes again, and he gets to his feet with his hands in his pockets and his head down to study for one long last moment his boots smudged in blood and snow and glass.

"You won't tell Nik I sniveled like a baby?" he asks, and looks up with a squint of his eyes.

"You were unapologetic and crude as the brother I remember."

"I told a penis joke."

"You told three."

Judge not a man by his six figure suits, for his smile is so much more.

* * *

"Well, congratulations, little brother. Not six days home and already you have broken half the French Quarter, like a toy you did not want the rest of us to have. What the hell is your problem?" Klaus snaps as Elijah leads Kol in through the front door, he absolutely unruffled, his suit perfectly pleated, Kol streaked with blood and brain and cinders, his hands in his pockets, his shoulder just a little slumped. "What makes you think you can run rampant round this city, uprooting everything I have-"

"Niklaus," Elijah interrupts smoothly, giving Klaus the kind of look that probably was the final straw for the members of the prom committee, who broke and scattered before her like little fleeing rabbits. "Leave it."

Klaus tilts his head for one long tense moment she feels in her throat and her stomach.

"Fine. Then onto your leash he goes, Elijah. Do not let him loose in my yard again. Do we all understand?" He flashes his dimples and holds out his hands to either side in his best I-am-douche-hear-me-roar stance. "Welcome home, Kol."

* * *

Three days later, Louisiana's governor declares a state of emergency in the city of New Orleans, and in floods the army with its guns and sandbags and razor wire.

They watch this unfold live on the gazillion-inch screen in Rebekah's room, Klaus with his hands behind his back and his lips pursed, Stefan leaning against the door frame, Rebekah perched with legs crossed on her bed, Elijah picking lint from his suit.

Kol sprawls in the chair in front of Rebekah's dressing table, his legs over its arm, his hands behind his head, his body slumped in complete relaxation as he swings one foot lazily over the side of this chair that creaks beneath his weight.

"A flare of recent gang activity that resulted in the deaths of nearly a dozen police officers, 51 bystanders, and the destruction of two blocks of the French Quarter after fires from two separate acts of arson spread to nearby buildings is the final straw for beleaguered law enforcement who have been unable to keep on top of a staggering case load from the recent increase in violence that has continued to rock the city for months now. A local curfew is being implemented from the hours of midnight until five a.m.; anyone out during this time will be subject to questioning and must have valid picture I.D. on them at all times. Governor Jindal asks that all citizens cooperate until the situation has been contained, and to report any suspicious activity immediately to the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, which will function temporarily as military HQ until this state of emergency has been suspended. We will keep you informed as we receive updates."

Klaus drags his eyes very slowly from the screen to his brother, lifting one hand to scrub the scruff of beard just coming in across his chin.

Kol holds his hands out to either side with a smile. "Whoops."

* * *

"I should have left him daggered. Everything was under control; I had the mayor, I had half Marcel's own people working against him, I was zeroing in on the police chief, on his top three sergeants- and then Kol happens." Klaus undoes the top button of his shirt with an angry jerk.

"Except that you love him, and you missed him," she points out, turning a page in the copy of  _Death In Venice_ she has snagged from his shelf. "I'm sorry, but is this boy going to stay, like,  _fourteen_ the whole time some creepy old skeez is perving on him from afar? Didn't they have CPS back then? Or, like, the motherly instincts that ping on any gross old jerk who tries to look up your skirt when you're only thirteen and you haven't yet learned that you always, always aim for the crotch so your mom has to step in because she has a gun? Although I guess she really kind of fumbled the whole thing with you. At least this guy's fifty. You're like the same age as dirt." She turns another page.

"Does he comprehend whatsoever the layer of difficulty he's added to every single little act from here on out? I'll have to go around compelling everyone anew, since they're all going to be twitchy -the ones that are still alive, of course, not that he left many of those- and Tim's already lost two from his team after all that chaos. He's not sure precisely what happened, but it sounds as though werewolves had at them while he was escorting the mayor back to the Blue Nile. They wouldn't have been stirred up at all, if Kol's boredom or temper tantrum or whatever the hell that was hadn't brought every single supernatural creature running to-"

"Do you know what you should do?" she interrupts, arching an eyebrow up at him as she flips another page.

He turns around with his shirt only partially unbuttoned, his jaw tight, his eyes taking on that one particularly murdery squint he gets when he is really pissed. "And what's that?"

" _Forgive_ him."

"You're not telling me you  _approve_ of his recent shenanigans."

She burrows her toes into the twisted sheets of his bed and looks up with both her eyebrows lifted, book forgotten in her hands. "Yes, actually. In fact, we planned all of it together. I didn't want to tell you- it was supposed to be a surprise. Sometimes you just have to shake things up with a good mass murder, you know? I was in a rut."

He rolls his eyes.

"I'm serious, Klaus. Instead of going all one supreme douche lord on him, why don't you remember that he is your brother, that until last week he was dead, and that you could barely stand that?"

He blows out a sigh and leans forward to set his hands on the bed, to touch his forehead to her own, to stay like that for just a moment with his eyes shut, his shirt gaping, his breath soft against her lips. "Where's your bit of self-righteousness for him? Hasn't he got a lecture to sit through, about the slaughter of innocents, the families who will wear their mourning through Christmas, all the sons who have been left behind?"

She looks down at the book pinned beneath her hands, and she swallows. "I killed somebody the other night. Because I was alone and I just needed somebody to talk to, and you had your brother, and I didn't know where Stefan was, and I just couldn't get what I needed from a blood bag. And then I was hungry, and I just…didn't stop. And that was it. And I didn't feel as bad about it as I thought I would. And that's how it's going to be, isn't it?" she whispers.

He opens his eyes.

He brings one hand to her cheek and he runs his thumb so  _lightly_ across the curve of the bone beneath it, feeling his way along like this is the first time, like it is still a gift, and she just-

She's going to keep this, isn't she? When everything else falls from her hands like dust will sieve itself through the fingers of the dead, uncontainable, when her mom can no longer look beyond, he will still stand before her, and he will look at her like he will never be  _done_ looking, like forever is not quite long enough, like he will always  _forgive_.

"Everything evolves, Caroline. Your morality is not going to duck that, love."

"I know. But that's what you liked about me, isn't it?" she asks in a voice she did not mean to be so small. "I mean, I'm 'full of light' or some crap like that, right? The paragon of virtue, the do-gooder yin to balance your puppy-kicking yang?"

His dimples dig themselves so deep she can tell he is trying not to laugh. "Sweetheart, you tried to strangle Bekah with the little snowflake lights you insisted we hang round the house in recognition of a holiday we don't even celebrate."

"Because she  _bit_ me!"

"Because you tossed off orders like Napoleon commanding his troops into Russia. You know she doesn't respond well to anything that isn't the sound of her own voice."

"Well, it's not my fault she was doing it wrong."

He kisses the tip of her nose, and he smiles again, and he has just the most ridiculous freaking pair of googly eyes, for a man who breakfasts on the nests of helpless kittens.

"Can we have, like…a date? Tomorrow? I haven't seen you very much for the last week or so, between your brother coming back, and me working informants, and keeping Stefan on his feet in his current Elena-less slump, and I just think that maybe we should have one day, just to ourselves. I know now's probably not the best time, I  _know_ everything just sort of hit the fan in the messiest of ways, but this is how it's pretty much always going to be, isn't it? For a while? There's always going to be something."

He cannot stop smiling. "You want to spend more time with me?"

"Is that how that came across? This is sort of awkward. I'm actually leaving you for another man. He's much richer. And younger."

"But how appealing can he really be, without a head?" Klaus lifts an eyebrow innocently.

"Actually, you'd be surprised how attractive the idea of a man without a mouth is."

"Really," he says, and trails his lips up the side of her neck all the way to her ear lobe.

"Yes."

He kisses the top of her ear, moves to her temple, her forehead, her eyelids.

She pulls him down by the collar of his shirt to make his next kiss a thing of sharp teeth, rough tongues, wandering hands.

He straddles her waist, pins her by the wrists, bites her shoulder with his human teeth, slips his fingers from her right wrist to cradle her cheek in his palm as he moves up her shoulder, onto her neck, her chin, her lips, and now she flips them both and rips his shirt down the middle, buttons scattering over the side of the bed.

He digs his fingers into her curls as she bends down to kiss him, opening his mouth roughly with her tongue, both of them breathless against one another, his hands moving to her ass, hers flashing down to pull his hips against hers as he begins to move, his hand slipping around to graze her thigh, to creep underneath her skirt, to nudge aside her panties with his thumb.

"Don't rip them," she gasps, and then she shudders all the way down to her toes as he slides his thumb against her clit, runs his middle finger down lower, pushes it in to the knuckle.

He sits up to kiss her, his finger pumping languidly, his teeth catching her bottom lip, and then so abruptly she lurches forward to grip the headboard, he lays back down and he jerks her up over his face.

"Oh my  _God_!" she hisses, digging into the wood with her nails as he noses her panties out of the way and he gives her one long stroke with his tongue.

He cups her ass in both hands, sucks her clit between his lips to carefully run his fang along its edge, thrusts his tongue inside so suddenly she jolts forward with her mouth open, her legs trembling, her fingers cracking the headboard underneath them.

He keeps her there until she orgasms so hard she has to lean her head down against the board, wheezing her release, and then he flips her onto her back, pulls her legs up over his shoulders, kisses her calf, the inside of her knee, her clit.

"Oh my God oh my God oh my  _God_! Ok, ok- there!" she gasps, arching into him as he hits just precisely right, swiveling his tongue in little figure eights that go all the way through her, coaxing her through one little ripple and into another that arches her back, that spasms her knees against his head, the sheets twisting beneath her as she pulls up handfuls of them, and then one more noisy shudder, her head thrown back against the pillows, and she hears him fumbling with his belt, his fingers shaking against the buckle.

He shuts his eyes when he slides into her, and she can tell this isn't going to take very long, because he shakes so hard against her, he breathes so noisily into her neck where he keeps his face pressed, his hips making these short little thrusts that jerk her underneath him, his mouth open against her, his necklaces sticking to his damp chest, and three kisses to the side of his neck, one to his cheek, his temple, the top of his sweaty head, and she hears him inhale sharply against her, his entire body tensing as he shivers through his long orgasm.

She relaxes down against the bed with him boneless on top of her.

He sighs into her neck and shifts his head over to tuck it just beneath her chin, running one hand down her side to find the curve of her waist, to slip his arm beneath her back and to hold her close against him.

It takes her a moment to realize there is a steady knocking just above her head, the wall vibrating just slightly against the board with the force of it.

"What the hell?" she whispers as Klaus lifts his head, his hand tightening against her back.

"Hello? Who is that?"

" _Bloody_ -" Klaus snaps, and lurches over her to slam his hand against the wall. "Get away from the  _bloody wall_!"

"Hello? Hello, can you hear me? Oh, thank God- listen, the code word is 'Jack draw me like one of your French girls'. The Eagle is coming."

Klaus rolls off her and yanks up his pants.

"Are you still there? I don't know how long I have, but I must tell you this."

Klaus smoothes her skirt down over her hips. "Get off the bed," he says through his teeth, and for perhaps the first time in their entire acquaintance she scrambles to obey, flashing herself up out of the covers and to the other side of the room, one hand to her throat.

"If you get into any trouble, I need you to say this rhyme: From afar I saw, the light along your jaw."

Klaus sweeps the bed out of the way with one effortless thrust of his arm.

"And in my loin a stirring, to hear your nocturnal purring."

He kicks a hole through the wall.

He shoves his hand in through ruined plaster and swirling dust, and now from the hole Kol emerges headfirst, Klaus' hand twisting the collar of his shirt around his throat, and as she cringes back against the far wall, Kol breaks Klaus' grip, drops to his feet, springs up onto the bed where he crouches for just a moment, brushing white flecks from his hair. "Hello, Caroline. Nik's going to kill me now, so I'll tell you the rest later, but did you know that everyone's favorite hybrid wrote erotic poetry when he was younger? Now aren't you glad you got the slip and dip out of the way before hearing that?"

Klaus jerks Kol up off the bed with one arm around his throat, and a sharp jerk and a sharper crack and he slumps limply in his brother's arms, his neck flopping loosely.

There is stunned silence for just a moment. "Oh my God- do none of you people have a single  _modicum_ of understanding of the word ' _boundaries'_?"she shrieks.

* * *

Nik gives him quite a lot of grief for that little stunt, but for a moment he was not on the wrong side of a veil, there was never a dead witch with only eighteen pitiful years to her name, he did not lament his choice.

But then, choices are often lamentable. Up by our bootstraps we go. You may pick through the pity of this graveyard of the bypassed, mourning all the faded testaments to your other options, but what is a life spent haunting? You don't ghost round the edges of years, both your feet still mired in the old.

He tells himself that.

But he keeps most of his days for himself, he stays away for so long from this family to whom he so longed to return that Christmas has touched its pale white light to the tips of the city before he pops back in to make his obligatory quips, to take to task Caroline and her hideous red hat, to poke round Nik's googly-eyed acquiescence to this girl and her human holidays.

He doesn't stay for very long.

It's nice out anyway. Very cold, the wind in mourning, the sleet like grapeshot against his face, his gloveless hands feeling every little prick that death did not give him.

He'd linger on that, 'little prick', he means, because what comedian lets pass an opening like that, but, you know, he doesn't feel like it.

How do you know a clown is sick? You check his nose?

No; that's dogs. Forgive him his little blunder; they are so often alike.

This is how he sees himself from one year into the next:

Nik courts him like he must have gone after pretty Caroline when finally he realized here is not a mere conquest, very awkwardly, trying to wedge his way in to these solitary walks he takes in no particular direction, to seize back the brother who always had a word, who never did not smile, and if he ever wants to talk, Nik assures him, but you don't touch the wound when it's still wet, big brother.

The tourists are no less bland than usual, spiced with the added agitation of the soldiers with their guns, but still nearly flavorless, a little chewy, all like chalk dust in his mouth, but that's most things these days, take no offense, darlings, he means nothing personal.

There is a nice pub. He wouldn't know it personally, he never did get that far, but good authority has it they offer the best Guinness outside Dublin, that you'll not find more traditional music, chattier bartenders, livelier dancing, and so most nights he can be found sometimes snacking on pub patrons, sometimes carousing with them, harassing the Donegal native who makes sure his best heads adorn the Mighty Kol's pints.

He had a friend who would have liked this place. Well, perhaps you wouldn't call him a friend (or at the very least not one without significant 'benefits'), and anyway, what friend spends most of your second death turning about in your head, until him too you must box away with all other things which mean too much, but he doesn't get loves, you can't attach that sort of significance to them, when all things save yourself pass on into the hands of Time or Death, so call him another friend who left just a bit too soon, as they always will.

He left some very nice memories. He thanks you for that, darling.

It's not such a small thing as you might expect.

* * *

"What do I say to him, Elijah?" he asks one evening, with one brother beside him and another not, his charcoal forgotten in his hand, Elijah's book laid aside in his lap.

"You be a brother to him, Niklaus. You give him either space or sympathy; whichever he requires."

But he just got him  _back_.

Kol has always made of himself a bit of a gnat, but better him in your ear than  _beyond_ \- he'll even take that bloody poetry which stalks him from his clumsy human years, little brother, he just wants-

He wants you here.

But if a certain blonde newborn is to be believed, his pain is superseded, he cannot bring his brother to heel, Kol's grief is not to be yoked, it is not always about him.

Apparently, not all things are.

He doesn't buy it either.

But she smiled enough to take the sting out of it, his Caroline with her two front teeth with their slight overlapping imperfection, and she touched his cheek, and he remembers that some things must be coaxed, that he cannot always set his boot to the throat of this world and press until out squeezes whatever it is he desires, and so he sighs and he looks down but he picks up his charcoal and he goes back to his hobby until from the uncharacteristically snowy January his brother emerges with white in his hair, dew in his stubble, and he sits with his two brothers without saying anything, his head back over the arm of the couch, his feet in Elijah's lap.

"Nik," he says into a silence to which has been added only the sounds of rustling pages and scratching charcoal. "Pun-off."

"Don't encourage him," Elijah warns, looking up from his collection of Ovid's erotic poems with a frown.

"I refuse to work with compost; it's degrading." Kol points at him.

"Without geometry, life is pointless," he fires back.

"Is a book on voyeurism a peeping tome?"

"Be kind to your dentist; he has fillings to."

"No," Elijah says tightly.

"Did you hear about the cross-eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?" Kol asks.

"The past, present, and future walk into a bar. It was tense."

"Neither one of you wants to come to regret this bonding moment," Elijah warns them both.

"All right- let's switch it up a bit. What did the salad say to the food critic?" Kol lifts an eyebrow at him.

He rolls his eyes. "Lettuce surprise you. Please, Kol. I'm not an amateur. What do you call chandeliers?"

"High lights. Neither am I, Nik. Where do polar bears vote?"

"The North Poll. What do you call a fake noodle?"

"An impasta."

Elijah backhands Kol with the binding of his book, ruining book and cheekbone alike, the former separating loudly in his hand, the latter sending out a gout of blood from which he just barely rescues his sketchbook, his wrist flicking it to safety over the side of his chair.

"Well that was a little overdramatic, Elijah," Kol says.

"You were out of line," he replies coldly, buttoning his suit jacket as he rises. "There will be a copy of James Michie's translation of Ovid's  _The Art of Love_  on my bedside table by tomorrow evening."

He exchanges a look with Kol, who wipes the blood from his already-healed face. "I guess we should have gone with "knock knock" jokes," Kol tells him.

"Whoever invented those should get a no-bell prize," he agrees, and ducks the fire poker Elijah javelins straight at his throat, slouching down just enough in his chair that the cushioned back of it takes the full brunt of Elijah's rage.

He dimples.

Kol is smiling at him.

There is a loosening inside his chest, as he looks up from beneath his eyebrows to return this smile almost shyly, and what knows a man who once renounced love and now beds down with it every night, but he thinks, perhaps, they're going to be all right, he and this brother he cherishes more than either of them will ever understand.

* * *

He takes Nik to his pub, but you know Nik, always has to put his boot to everything, so he compels the whole place according to his amusements, which today involve the two homophobes in the corner acting on what turn out to be some very gay urges, buried underneath the bigotry, the other patrons all standing round on their heads on pain of death, the bartender perfecting that spot of foam at the top of his beer with downcast eyes, and it's a bit of a shame, he misses the music, and the locals are actually quite entertaining, when you aren't eating them, but they have a nice conversation about Caroline, and he likes seeing his brother like this, nearly bashful, full of self-deprecating laughter and admiration for one who is not himself, half his conversation directed to his beer, which does not judge.

You'd be surprised to know he doesn't either, Nik. It thunders up behind you with its claws unsheathed and takes you down on the run, love.

He gets that.

You'd be surprised how much he gets that.

He's never been Bekah; he has never loved too much, excepting perhaps his family, who never did return it quite satisfactorily enough, but he had a few, Nik. Perhaps he's always tiptoed round them, because who knows, how can you possibly understand when and what to label this churning in your gut, but you don't lie for 97 years, taking your sweet bloody time, getting over a boy and his cap, you do not feel between your hands the texture of life, just beyond your fingertips, and think still of choosing death, for some lingering crush.

But that's over for him. You let go.

It's all you do, in death.

So go on and tell him, Nik, about your happiness, because though it leaves a bit of sourness in his throat, he does not refute your right to it.

He loves you. He'll take your smile.

It'll be enough, to live on the scraps of others' joys.

He'll tell himself that.

* * *

A pretty boy in uniform stops him somewhere round 1:00 on a Tuesday evening, who can tell, when you're this sloshed, and he sends him on his way with a pinch to the ass and a reassurance that of course he doesn't need any identification, darling, he practically ran this town, nearly a century ago, you don't have that many homosexual relations in all the best churches, unless you have the neck of the city slotted neatly in your hand, and you wouldn't happen to know, would you, where he could get some more, because he used to get pissed just exactly like this with a friend of his and then grope him right upon God's altar itself, and what a laugh that was, waking up plastered to a pew with sweat and sex as in streamed the morning ceremony with Tim still half-asleep in his arms, both their trousers only half-assedly done up.

Do you know what he's probably doing right now?

Someone else.

They always move on. Bonnie will have returned herself to the clutches of Jeremy Gilbert, because perhaps he was a bit of a bump in the road, but apparently his jokes are not meant for lasting impressions, because everything just rolls itself right on by him, friend, family, foe, just like time, all of them, slick as the centuries.

But he won't sink himself to his neck in his own self-pity.

That is not for the fates of funnymen.

So he does find himself a man, two of them, actually, a couple 300 years committed that enjoys themselves an interloper from time to time, and what he does with them all morning and into the afternoon he won't tell you, but neither of them are in walking condition by the time he's done, and the bite marks across his shoulders and down his chest take nearly ten minutes to heal, and a bit of haze clings still to his eyes, because do you know what's funny-

Someone is wearing Tim's hat.

Just across the street.

Just exactly the same one, with the little kick of hair at the back, and the tufts of overgrowth down the ears.

He steps off the curb, and the hat is gone.

* * *

He sends Tim off with two new recruits for the head of the Robinson pack, and halfway through his memorization of one of Caroline's newest additions to his filing cabinet, the boy puts a shaky call through to his phone.

"The soldiers have got wooden bullets."

He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Wonderful. Well, you're still in one piece, or at least enough of one to pass this along, so what about your cohorts?"

"They're both dead. One of them- he didn't notice one of the soldiers. He said he was feeling a little off, needed to feed before we took on any wolves. They caught him at it, and unloaded into us all. I compelled who I could. Had to talk a couple of people back into bed, after they heard the gunshots."

"Tim," he says with a smile in his voice. "If you keep losing minions at this rate, I might have to get upset. You don't want me to give you to Caroline, do you?"

There is a long silence on the other end.

He leans back with another smile and puts his boots up on his desk.

* * *

Tim returns alone with Denny Robinson's head, and slops it wordlessly onto the floor of his study.

"I don't want to get shot at for you anymore."

He leans back and he steeples his fingers as the boy strands his ground, quite impressively, he has to say, for a lad of Tim's rather timid disposition, but then he never was exactly a coward, simply that useful type of subordinate who sets himself to bended knee because he does not understand how to thunder his refusals.

He smiles. "You don't get to vote yourself off the island, Tim."

The boy swallows. "You're kind of busy, to chase me to the other side of the world, if that's where I want to take meself."

"I don't have to. Every continent belongs to me, Tim. There is nowhere I cannot reach. You see, you made the unfortunate misstep of being good at your job. Now, if you hadn't, you'd be dead, so bit of a rock and a hard place, I know, but it is what it is. I am, not, however, entirely without sympathy, and I would never take a man's choice from him. That's what makes us the writers of our own stories, isn't it? You don't want to dance round like a puppet at the mercy of some other author. So. Continue to perform little tasks for me, and to perform them well, certainly more flawlessly than your last couple of outings, or I rip off your head. It'll be fast. You've been useful; I won't draw it out."

"Well, fook me. You can't expect me to choose, with that sort of variety."

"You're lucky I've become more tolerant of late to sarcasm. You have Caroline to thank for that." He leans forward just a little. "You can see yourself out. Oh, and Tim. If you need a reason to stay a bit longer, either in this city or on this particular side of the veil, I suggest you pop round The Kerry Irish Pub. Now keep in mind he's still stinging a bit from recent events, so tread lightly. Or I'll eat your heart from your chest with a spoon."

* * *

He's not in a particularly chatty mood tonight, so he takes his beer to the corner where the music is loudest, swallows it with just a couple tosses of his head, picks out his snack for the night from among the tables nearest him.

He'll probably fuck her first. She's very pale, blue eyes, colorless lips, blonde hair to her ass- remind you of anyone?

Him either.

Do humans wander in solitude among trees you cannot touch, when they bid their farewell to one life and pass on to the next? Do they find another death and cling to its very soft hand, and walk beside it for all the time they are allotted, which may be a very long time among minutes that do not bend themselves quite correctly round the clock, but like all things that end was still not quite long enough?

He picks up another Guinness from the bartender and sits back down with it, just savoring it this time, rolling it very slowly round his mouth, keeping his foot in time with the fiddle, one arm draped round the back of his chair as he flicks his eyes from victim to band.

"Jesus  _Christ_ ," someone blurts from the front of the pub, and he takes another drink. Is there going to be another fight? He likes those. Last night a woman came in to retrieve her husband and his girlfriend, and not a one of them made it out without something smudged from its original place. He finished the husband off in the alley, quite tasty, flush with adrenaline and illicit bathroom sex.

The wife didn't seem to mind watching very much at all, but who can tell for sure.

They're always so complimentary, right before the final bite.

There is only this one startled expletive, though, and when he glances casually toward the front of the pub, craving his bit of drama, he sees only the regulars and their pints, laughing over some witticism, beer heads foaming round their lips.

The band finishes their song with a flourish, takes their applause with a bow, bursts into their next reel with a hearty, "And a one, two, three!"

His victim is still going quite strong, immersed in a contest with her wobbly-breasted companion, who shakes everywhere when she laughs, and so he knocks off his second beer and he slips himself in at the counter to put in an order for his third, leaning both elbows against the sticky bar, snapping his fingers for Pat. "Yeah, oh Mighty Kol?" he asks seriously, dabbing his hands down with a bit of damp cloth.

That never fails to amuse him. You could live to a million, darling, and never grow tired of all your little compelled nicknames, spat out so solemnly.

Last week he was King Dong, to the officer he let pat him down (he was quite pretty) after he drove a stolen squad car into the back of the NOPD's armored personnel carrier.

"Another Guinness, darling."

"You know a guy in a hat, Mighty Kol?"

He rocks himself just slightly back on his elbows. "What?"

"A Donegal cap- you know, really traditional, sort of old-fashioned, looks like, uh- looks like one of those newsboy caps? Some guy wearing one of those busted in here a few minutes ago, looked straight at you and then turned right back round. Looked like he was going to puke. Sent someone out to check on him; found him sittin' on the curb with his head between his knees. Said he was all right."

He straightens up very slowly. "Is he still there?" he asks, and there is no answer fast enough to reach him, as he shoulders his way through the regulars and out onto Decatur, where the January air has begun to solidify into patches of white between puddles.

He isn't.

* * *

But when he reaches Clinton and he saunters his way toward N. Clay with both hands in his jacket pockets, there is the subtle echo of furtive footsteps somewhere behind him.

He crosses N. Clay, loops around to make his way back onto Decatur, past the French Market and down onto N. Peters, those footsteps behind him all the while, this meandering route carrying them both onto the nearly empty Elysian Fields, the snow beginning to squeeze itself from the clouds with some fury now, his boots sinking in to the tread.

He waits for a lone woman to make her way past him, to reach the car parked in dusty wait along the curb and to ease her cautious way up the street and into the intersection.

He listens to the thick silence of the falling snow all round him.

He exhales a long white cloud that is more tremulous than he wanted it to be.

"Unless you're 6' 3", your dick is big enough to choke my brother, and you have a birthmark on your right knee, you're going to have a very bad night," he calls out, still walking, keeping his hands in his pockets and his eyes straight ahead.

"It's me left knee, you fuck," Tim says from behind him, and he stops with his cheeks in pain, his smile stretches itself that wide.

"Very good, darling; that was a test."

He turns slowly round.

Tim is exactly the same boy he abandoned for his grave in 1915.

His twenty-one-year-old forehead will never know a line, of course, his hair not one silver strand, his knees will forever endure church flagstones without an arthritic protest, but if time does not leave its stain in the creases left behind by sun and experience, it at least gets its hand on the eternally shuffling styles of clothing and hair.

But here he stands in his suspenders and his cap, vest buttoned to the top, sleeves rolled to his elbows.

He bursts out laughing. "Are you still wearing that hat?"

Tim spins partially round to put his hand to his forehead, pushing his cap up out of his eyes. "Christ on a bleedin' cross, you  _fucker_."

"You got more Irish," he says, letting his mirth soften into this smile he cannot seem to drop, hands shifting in his pockets. "Your accent's heavier. You must have gone back."

"For forty years. And then I crossed over into Russia, and then I spent a while in France." He lets go of the bridge of his nose and clears his throat, tipping his head back to look up into the snow.

"They do taste better, don't they? The French?" He watches Tim's shoulders tense, his throat flex, and he drops the smile from his voice and his face at last. "How long did you wait?"

"A lot longer than I'd like to say. Lot of rumors goin' round back then. I hung around the city until I heard the one about the youngest Mikaelson dying, and then I left for Kerry."

Tim drops his head and cuts a side glance toward him.

"I got better." He shrugs with his hands still in his pockets. "I'm very durable like that. You remember. You broke a church pew underneath me." Tim merely keeps looking at him, one hand in the pocket of his vest, the other dangling down his side. "A hand job for your thoughts?"

The boy wets his lips, looks away, rubs the bridge of his nose. "Christ," he says, and when he turns back, he is laughing, just a touch of mirth, more of a smile than anything, those crinkles round his eyes and across the bridge of his nose, and he remembers the freckles on the bridge of that nose, and lazily kissing them with more tenderness than he wanted to admit as they lay sated in Tim's hotel room, playfully punching and wrestling till their lips got more serious.

"What are you even still doing here?"

"Working for your brother."

"Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan, you're old enough to know better."

"When Ma gave me the full name, it was because I was about to get the belt."

"Do you want it? That's kinky; I like it."

Tim rolls his eyes.

"You wouldn't have brought it up if you weren't hinting, darling. Besides, you look very good for your age. I like a man who carries his years well."

"123, and you wouldn't take me for a day over 122 and a half."

They have both got a bit of that stupid smile of the irrepressible on their faces, Tim's hand slipping from vest pocket to trouser, where he gets his fingers round something that clicks inside his palm.

"Are you still carrying that same pocket watch?"

"Yeah. Broke it, though, when I was in Ireland. It's just something for me to fiddle with now."

"I can give you something else to play with," he suggests, lifting his eyebrows innocently. Tim stifles the little smirk that flares up round his lips. "Do you want to do the scene where we run into one another's arms in slow motion now?"

"I'm taken, actually."

"Really? What's his/her name? And precise address. No reason."

"I've taken our savior the lord Jesus Christ for my husband."

"So you're a nun."

"You'd be surprised how good me legs look in one of those habits."

"I wouldn't be at all surprised, actually. They're very nice legs."

Tim coughs some of the embarrassment from his throat. "I did actually stay in a convent for a while. I took the habit as a bit of a prank. They wouldn't let me in at first, on account of me penis and all, but I blustered until they finally actually believed I was just a very ugly woman. I thought…it was something you might have thought was funny."

He leans forward just a bit, hands still in his pockets. "I would have. Although it would have been funnier if we'd led the entire convent astray with our wanton ways. I think we'd have had them all underneath each other's skirts within a week."

"Most of them were anyway."

"Yes, but were there any orgies? You can't have sin without an orgy."

"Not that I got to participate in."

"Well that's unfortunate. But you were still new, and without a guiding hand, so that's all right."

"You forgive me?"

"I forgive anyone who sucks cock like you, darling."

Tim looks down with a little laugh that puts another layer of pink in his cheeks.

He smiles to see it. You always could draw out his bashfulness with just a bit of crudeness or ingenuity, both of them naked under the sheets with their cocks in the other's hand, Tim sucking on his neck, he pinching the boy's nipples, and a carefully-placed comment and he'd let loose with that slew of Irish expletives to blister the most vulgar of ears and duck his head down into the pillow, to laugh out his embarrassment in private. "What do you do for Nik?"

Tim clicks the watch in his pocket. "I break things. People, mostly. Werewolves. Some of Marcel's men. Whoever he points me toward, really. I went to your house tonight to quit, actually."

"And he gave you the 'quitters are dead to me, literally' speech, did he?"

"Yeah. And then he told me to check the Kerry, for something that might make me want to stay. Which is the only option aside from getting my head ripped off anyway."

They look at one another for a long moment, the snow piling itself between them. "I'd hold him back, you know, if you wanted to make a run for it."

A faint smile flickers across the boy's lips. "I think I'll probably stick round for a bit. Just to see the legendary 'King Dong' in action."

"You heard about that, did you?"

"I should have fuckin' known it was you."

"What did he say about me? Did he mention that I'm hung like a stallion? He lingered there during the pat-down, I swear he did."

"He did. He's gayer than one of our trips to the confessional booth. He's an informant of ours. I'm surprised Klaus didn't jump your ass for that little stunt."

"Nik's trying to be nice to me right now. He's not very good at it, but he's trying. He's not always as mean as he wants everyone to think." He stirs a bit of the snow with his boot, both their hands still in their pockets, the silence putting on bulk, Tim's hand busy with his watch, January gathering its final few breaths into this one white exhalation that begins to fill with ice.

Tim shrugs sleet from his shoulder.

He clears his throat, and it's not at all like him, Tim is the fumbler to whom words do not always come, but he supposes he's still reeling, he's got to tentatively toe his way back into anything that might hook itself too deep, you don't thrust yourself belly-first into the sea.

"Do you want company, on your next little outing?"

* * *

"Because it's a sucky code!" Caroline snaps, crossing her arms over her chest, that particularly stubborn face of hers making its way across her brow, her lips, her eyes.

"Excuse me, who's been around for a thousand years?"

"Excuse  _me_ , who organized the 10th grade Snowflake Ball in  _two days_ and pulled it off without one single hitch? That's like invading Russia in the middle of the winter- and winning."

"It is not, love."

"Excuse me, but have you invaded Russia in the winter?"

"Yes, actually."

"Oh my God- you did  _not_. You just have to try and show me up, because you are such an incredible  _freaking_ egoist about everything-"

"Who threw my bloody write-up in the rubbish bin and said, "We don't need this", and then slapped down her own proposal like it was the tablet of Moses?"

" _It was a sucky code_!"

"It was based off the bloody Irish intelligence network I worked with for years- the ones who slipped the English noose because of a code just like this one,  _sweetheart_ , so unless you have any experience dodging British counterintelligence squads, I think perhaps you should-"

"What? Shut my dumb, newborn mouth? Go ahead. Say that.  _I dare you_."

"I'm not a bloody idiot!" he snaps.

"Well, that's not what this code would suggest."

Why on earth did he not bloody sink his teeth in to the  _vein_ , drain her dry, toss her aside, go on about his myriad centuries with his heart still untouched, his pride intact, his patience not tried beyond his bloody  _murdering_ point-

He looks up at the ceiling, works his jaw, blinks aside the last of these rich red fantasies, returns his eyes to Caroline's unyielding own with a little pleasant smile he does not mean at all. "I've indulged you far beyond what I have ever allowed an amateur, Caroline. You have a hand in every aspect of this little war-"

"And have I dropped the ball on anything, or are they all still in the air?"

He licks his lips. "That's not the point, love."

"The point is that Klaus knows best because everything has to be his way, we all have to prostrate ourselves before his genius, every little detail needs to be fine-tuned by the only capable freaking hands in the entire freaking world, which just so happen to be his own."

"Look who's  _talking_!" he thunders, and she does not have the common courtesy to so much as blink.

"Well, I'm sorry if I like things done  _correctly_."

"You mean your way."

"It's the same thing!"

"I'd have your  _spleen_ in my hand for this, Caroline, if you were anyone else!" he hisses, leaning both his hands down on his desk to tilt himself toward her, his necklaces swinging out to chime themselves off one another, his fingers digging down into the wood, his shoulders hunching up round his ears.

"Don't  _touch_ my spleen! It's  _mine_!" she snaps, and she looks so genuinely affronted, her head lowered, her eyes with their touch of fire, those two overlapping teeth just barely visible beyond her parted lips, that for a moment his anger clears, his shoulders relax themselves just a touch from this posture of the slighted, he bursts out laughing.

"It's not funny!"

"You're pretty when you're angry." He dimples.

"Well, you're not."

"That was petty, love."

"I'm in a petty mood. I thought we should match." She tosses her curls over her shoulder.

"It's petty to place my thousand years of strategic experience over your little high school organizations whose primary functions served to determine whether the masses should consume berry punch or mango guava?"

"I'm just saying, maybe you should consider a different perspective."

"So if Stefan were to saunter in here, and drop off his own proposal, you would of course give it a proper looking-over and not relegate it to the rubbish bin, where fall all ideas not your own?"

She cocks her hip out to one side. "I'd at least make him feel like his ideas were valued."

"Before you threw them in the rubbish bin."

She throws her hands up in the air. "Ok, oh mighty  _seer_ \- now look into my future and tell me which item of yours I'm going to dip in the toilet when you're not looking!"

"I don't have to be a seer to predict your irrational need to control every little aspect of everything you have ever touched, to the exclusion of all ideas not your own, love."

"Do you understand how freaking  _ironic_ that is, coming from you?"

"Thank you for your time and your filing cabinets, now get out of my bloody office!" he snaps, slamming himself back into his chair and putting his feet up on his desk so hard he kicks the stack of papers from the edge to flutter themselves in a noisy snowfall about Caroline.

"Who wants to be in here anyway! Egomaniacs only need apply!"

She storms into the hallway.

He jerks his feet down and flashes after her. "Where are you going?"

"None of your business!"

"Might I remind you that there are soldiers out there, armed with large guns and vampire-specific ammunition?"

"Oh, good! You did pick up that by 'none of your business' I meant, 'bye, honey, out to run straight into the arms of my enemies with 'Surprise, bitch!' and a pair of fangs tattooed on my freaking forehead!'"

"Caroline!" he spits.

"Klaus!"

" _Fine_! Get yourself bloody shot! I could use the quiet!" he roars, and he whisks back into his office, slams the door behind him, lets her take out her own enraged exit on the front door, snatches his jacket from the back of his chair and tears down the stairs after her, three steps at a time.

He storms all the way down Chartres in pursuit of her, the recent storm springy beneath his feet, his breath white as the ground, midnight touching her stark black contrast to Caroline's curls, the cars made rare by this military-enforced curfew sending up their infrequent gouts of exhaust-softened winter.

"Caroline!"

She does not turn round.

He lets her make it all the way to St. Louis Cathedral before he closes the distance in one supernatural stride, and grabs her by the elbow.

" _Excuse_ you!"

"Temper tantrum's over, love."

"This is not a temper tantrum, Klaus; it's a jerk boycott, and  _you_ do not get to declare when it's done." She jerks her arm from his fingers.

He grabs her roughly by the other arm. "I said,  _let's go_."

"And I'm saying  _bite me_!"

"You're making a scene."

"Sorry! Am I embarrassing you in front of your lord and savior's holy house of worship? I know how much Jesus means to you." She tries to jerk herself from his grasp again, and he clamps down with his fingers and yanks her back toward him, her heels skidding just a touch on the sidewalk with its January mantle, her curls whipping, her eyes flaring. "I know I am a thousand years weaker than you, but let go of my arm.  _Now_."

He throws her arm back in her face when he releases it, and holds both his hands out to the sides with his nastiest smirk.

"Now  _leave_."

"I'll stay as long as I please, I will walk  _wherever I like_ , and I will not be bloody  _managed_ by some bossy little thing who forgets her station. Half this city is under my control, Caroline. I will  _tear it to the ground_  if I please. I will not be ordered out of any section of it."

"Oh my  _God_ you are so annoying. We  _get it_ , Klaus. You're the overlord of freaking  _everything_. Actual kings licked your so-much-more-divine-than-the-rest-of-us feet. I don't  _care_. I'm telling you, get off this sidewalk. It's  _mine_."

"There seems to be a plethora of that going round. This sidewalk is yours. My house is yours. Every portion of this war which ought to rest in the hands of centuries-old generals, who fought among the greats- all yours."

"Just-  _God_! I could kill you sometimes! Just…leave, Klaus. I need three seconds to myself to think," she says, and in her voice there is a sudden fatigue that puts his fear up higher than his back.

If clocks hold him in no thrall with their meaningless minutes, he feels still the pressure of their fleeing hands, draining away the fragile hours of this relationship he cannot possibly sustain.

Nothing gives with both hands to the lives of creatures like him, not God, Fate, Mother Nature, and so what hope he has held, that he may keep both his brother and this girl who somehow looked beyond, he has nurtured very carefully, coddling it along like he has done nothing else, and now with her disappointed eyes and her defeated shoulders, she puts her fingers to this feeble dream, and she pinches it out.

He links his hands behind his back, working his throat round his terror.

He has a point to make, something eloquent, he's sure, he's dug round in all the tomes of the most gilded tongues, you know, bent his ear to only the greatest of poets, the most learned of philosophers, he has circled this planet more times than he can count, and of India's spices and Santorini's waters he can paint you the most flattering of images, with only his vast vocabulary, but what bit of flattery, wheedling,  _coercion_ he has to reel her back in, he couldn't tell you.

She sighs. "Don't look at me like that, Klaus. I don't have to like you all the time, to be in love with you. Ok? So just go back to your place, and leave me alone for a little while, so I can have a much-needed and much-deserved break from you." She smiles just a touch. "And then in a few days, when I can both love and like you, we can have really dirty makeup sex. Me on top, of course," she tells him, and then she just leaves him bloody standing there, and what damage she's inflicted on his pride, this precocious little thing.

He doesn't even go after her.

* * *

Nik crawls into bed with him one night after some tiff with Caroline, still smelling of whatever murder he has recently committed.

He has feigned sleep often enough to know precisely how to breathe to lure Nik into tentatively brushing the hair from his eyes, his fingers callused with war but careful with tenderness.

He could say, Nik, I thought you'd never come.

He could say, quickly, my loins ache for no other, and put his hand on Nik's knee with a wink, so that he may be knocked aside of his own accord.

But Nik watches him with the eyes of a mother whose infant failed to take one of his breaths, who stuttered just slightly in his normal rhythms, and he rather likes it.

So he keeps his mouth shut, and he lets his brother burrow down beside him, nearly on top of him, because aside from being a general tit, his brother is also a bed-hogger of the first order, and after some minutes, Nik drops off that precipice into sleep with his usual flair, puddling his slumber down onto his pillow, and he stifles his laugh in his own, and he lies there for a long time, just smiling at this brother he was not supposed to get.

* * *

Caroline keeps true to her word, stubborn little thing, and does not set foot to his home for days.

Kol at least has got some of the quickness back to him, his smile not a thing to be unearthed from beneath layers he does not know how to probe (murder always did cheer the poor thing up), so he sets the rest of his little murder squad to other tasks, and ships Kol off with Tim, into the heart of the soldiers, to ferret free Marcel's men right beneath the noses of these humans who are no match for his little brother.

"They're only escalating the violence with their presence," Elijah observes one afternoon, staring from the window of his office down onto the street.

"No one likes an occupying force," he says distractedly, twirling his pen round his fingers.

"We'll need to do something about them, Niklaus."

"We will. But let them sit on their thumbs a bit, while we run round beneath their noses. If our agents are at greater risk, so also are Marcel's. They've already done a couple of my jobs for me. Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we, Elijah?"

"And Caroline, Niklaus?"

He leans back with his pen still in his hand, angling his feet up onto his desk. "Caroline's actually quite capable."

There is a slight smile in his brother's voice, when he responds. "You sound disappointed."

"Yes. It's a bit annoying."

"What does she need with the arm of the most powerful man in the world, if she can wield her own sword?"

"Don't psychoanalyze me, Elijah, you know I don't like it," he says, but he doesn't have the heart to put his usual snarl into it.

"And Kol, brother?"

"Doing much better. You know unadulterated violence always perks him right up. And Tim. Credit where it's due, I suppose. If Bekah would put in an appearance once in a while, I'm sure he'd be back to his full, irritating potential in no time at all. He's still occasionally half-hearted about his little tricks."

"They'll sort it out between them. She's angry with him for their little fall-out right before he died, but most of all, for dying in the first place. Kol is still hurt. You know he holds onto it perhaps longer than any of us, whatever face he may put forward."

He looks down at his pen with a little purse of his lips.

Elijah turns from the window to rest the tips of his fingers very lightly on his shoulder, just for a moment, just long enough that he understand the warmth behind it, and then he vanishes into the hall.

* * *

They belly out in the snow behind the dumpster of Antoine's, Tim with his revolver already in hand, he with chin set casually upon his palms, his feet swinging behind him, the night trickling a few bits of rain down the back of his neck.

Tim keeps darting little side looks at him, shoes shifting about behind him, the revolver fogging over with each little blast of his breath, his cap pulled low enough to nearly hide his eyes, that piece of hair at the nape of his neck coiling itself up with the confusion of this damp night that is unsure whether to be winter or spring.

Tim touches his tongue to his lips.

He looks away again.

He sneaks another glance.

"For fuck's sake, Kol," he whispers, his voice strained with laughter. "Would you put either your hands or your fuckin' feet down? You look like you're waiting for your tenth grade crush to give you a ring."

"You're just jealous you can't pull off this pose with the same style."

"Donnolly's going to be pissed, getting taken out by a fruitcake."

"Which one? You, or me?"

"I was talking about you."

"That's very rich, coming from you, darling. Who's been checking out my ass all night?"

" _You_."

"Well, can you blame me?"

Tim shakes his head and looks down with a little smile, tightening his hand round his revolver, setting his feet back into the little niches he has kicked himself in the snow, squinting his eyes off toward the door to the kitchen.

"Let's crash their dinner."

"He's got almost four hundred years on me- I'm taking him by surprise. I happen to like me head where it is."

"So do I- well, it's a bit better facedown in my lap, but I'll take what I can get. The point is, I wouldn't let it get marred. You've got a face to rival mine." He drops his hands and pushes off them, getting onto his feet with a little hop. "Well, not to  _rival_ mine, of course -nothing does that- but no one would spot us mid-coitus and wonder why I hadn't tied a bag round your head. Or why I was having coitus with you in the first place." He inclines his head toward the door. "What's the verdict? Am I to have all the fun by myself?"

Tim flops over onto his back to give the sky one long appraisal, jerking his hat up out of his eyes and pocketing his revolver. "Fuck me."

"Are you offering?"

Tim kicks at the back of his leg; he dodges it with a laugh.

"I won't let you come out missing anything. I promise." He reaches down for Tim's hand, hefts him easily back onto his feet, dusts the snow from the boy's back. "If I can eat three of them in under a minute, let's say forty seconds, you have to slap four of the soldier's asses and get one of them to like it without any compulsion."

"I'm not doing that."

"All right. One of them doesn't necessarily have to like it, but he has to experience at least a bit of homoerotic confusion, enough to make him angry that he looks at his friends' penises when they shower together, which he always thought was just something men do, to compare length and girth, but which it turns out is actually just something he does, because apparently if he lets himself get too lax with his morals, he gets a stirring in his trousers when pretty Irishmen manhandle him."

"Do you really think I'm pretty?"

"You know I do."

"You're just saying that."

"If I promise you I'm not, will it get me under your skirt?"

"If you can eat three of them in twenty seconds."

He kicks open the door to the kitchen.

"Greetings!" he calls out cheerfully, and takes a running start onto the most crowded of the tables, upsetting dishes every which way he puts his foot. "Sir, do you have a watch?" he asks the diner closest to him. "No?"

He punches his hand through the man's throat, and rips free what he finds. "Tim! Put your fingers to his carotid; there you are, darling. It takes about a minute after death to lose the pulse, so start counting."

"I said you had twenty seconds."

"A minute, and I clear this entire room, and you let me take liberties with whatever I want for thirty seconds."

He leaps to the next table, kicks Donnolly in the head as the man flashes to his feet, jerks one of his companions over the table and straight into his teeth, empties him with one rip of his fangs, discards his heart, sends the body after it in a wet red heap, thrusts his boot heel through all the bones in the hand Donnolly curls round the table, yanks him forward, gives him a chop to the throat that sends his head ten feet through the air (he learned that one from Elijah), silences the screaming woman beside this still-spurting corpse, turns himself in a neat back flip that carries him off the edge of the table and into the pathway of a fleeing waiter.

He pins the man one-handed on his back, tears into his face, lets fly with the blood he cannot swallow fast enough to keep from his chin, spins himself into a backfist that ruins the temple of another scrambling staff member.

Tim's veins show faintly round his eyes, his fingers still to the diner's neck.

He drops them with a shake of his head. "Sorry. He's gone."

A waiter breaks from behind the table where he has tucked himself, pissing himself as he goes.

Tim clotheslines him. "And there's another one, behind the table in the corner. That's two less than the entire room."

"I don't think that was a minute."

"Sorry; you said till there's no more pulse. You can feel it for yourself."

"There's so much connotation in that last sentence I won't touch it with the ten foot pole I could also make a crack about, but I won't, because I'm behaving myself."

"This is what behaving yourself looks like?"

"Yes. Look, I'll even let this one go," he says, and helps the man Tim has got pinned effortlessly beneath his shoe to both feet, setting his hands on his shoulders. "Strangest thing you've ever seen, darling- some rabid wolf helped himself to the faces of all your friends here. Run along and warn people, would you?" He slaps the man's ass hard enough to jolt him through several steps of a head start, and cracks his neck with a little smile.

"What about the one in the corner?"

"Do you want him?"

"No."

"Well, I was just being polite anyway," he tells Tim, and in a blink he crosses the room, kicks the table aside, lifts the gibbering little thing up by the throat to draw himself a long draught.

He crumples the neck up in his hand and tosses the whole limp thing into the wall.

"Drinks at the Kerry?"

* * *

It's odd, how quickly he sinks back into companionable silence with this boy, two deaths and nearly a century between them, surely a few of Tim's own trysts floating round somewhere in either heart or homeland, but neither of them have to force their laughter, it comes out quite easily, they both smile when a shift puts them accidentally knee to knee.

"So two deaths. And I thought I was accomplishing things, cutting up English tenders with a rifle I had to get off a dead peeler."

"Don't feel too badly; I just naturally one-up everyone." He takes a sip from his Guinness, swivels himself round on his stool to press his knees more deliberately against Tim's. "Did you have a good time? For your first century? It's the hardest one."

He should have seen you through it. He should have stretched himself out belly to dirt in one of those ditches, adrenaline up, rifle steady, fog collecting round his heels, his toe giving an occasional poke to the leg you always tense too much, when nerves have got you by the throat, his hand swatting down into your eyes that bloody cap which must have seen so much without him.

But. Dirt over the coffin and all that.

You didn't forget him.

That's the thing.

Tim runs a hand down the hair at the nape of his neck, giving his nearly-empty mug a little shake. "It was fine."

"Fine? That's all you have to say about it? I killed a king, fought in the crusades, rode into England with the Normans, and had my first homosexual experience in my first century alone."

Tim smiles just a little, looking down at the hands he has still got wrapped round his mug. "I spent a lot of my time in Ireland moping. I wasn't supposed to be there by meself."

You know, he never would have expected that. He is so often mourner and not mourned.

So he whiled away his 97 years not alone as he thought, sunk in his own brain where existed only blackness and blame, but carried through many an Irish afternoon on the shoulders of a boy who could well have set his burden down and lost himself in the lust of war?

He likes the sound of that.

Did he keep up a little streaming commentary in your head? When you packed your gelignite into sticks for the feet of unsuspecting soldiers, did he point out how aptly you handled something with such a phallic suggestion to its shape? Did you reach over in the midst of a brutal Galtee night for a shoulder you forgot was no longer there?

And your hat? Did you let anyone else wear it?

He touches his glass to his lips, but he takes just a tiny sip. "Did you get over that little bump of the conscience everyone has to stumble over?"

"Yeah. That I did get over. Well, I mean, I'm not your brother, but I can go to bed and sleep like the dead after a meal."

"You always did that anyway. If you remember, I used to draw things on you while you were sleeping."

"You put lipstick and a dress on me, you fucker."

He bends forward to touch his forehead to the rim of his mug, sending out a laugh to startle the nearby customers. "I did that to Nik once, too. Well, I put lipstick on him. I couldn't manage the dress. And Bekah had to help me with it; he's not nearly as heavy a sleeper as you."

The door lets in a gust of air that's settled it's mind at last on winter. You never can be sure, with these southern seasons.

The body that slips through is carrying quite a noisy heart, blood surging all round it, sweat bringing out the scent of the gun inside the man's pocket, his heels each their own little shot against the floor, he moves that jerkily.

Tim is smiling at him.

He likes that. He'll keep it, if you don't mind, as he was not allowed to hold onto another smile that was just beginning to come round to him, so he tips himself casually back on his stool, keeping himself upright with one hand round the edge of the bar, and he knocks this gun the man draws from his pocket so hard across the room he takes the man's hand with it.

The gun discharges.

The bartender sinks with a cry to his knees, the general chaos following a bullet breaks out behind him, the band throws down its instruments to join the charge for the door.

"Jesus Christ!" Tim snaps, on his feet before the man and his stump even hit the floor, and now down onto four legs thuds his barstool as Tim kicks the man in the head, puts a heel to his neck, flashes down to plunge one hand into his chest.

He throws the heart onto the floor beside his attacker's peeling gray face.

"That bullet was for you, darling. One of Marcel's?"

"I think so; he looks familiar, anyway."

"Somebody gave you up as one of Nik's, then." He pulls the boy's hat down over his eyes. "Let's get you off the streets for tonight."

"I'll have to switch me hotel."

"We'll get you settled into one under Nik's control. You'll be all right," he says, and slings his arm round Tim's shoulders when the boy's heart takes a sudden leap, his hat coming down a little lower, his hands slipping nervously into his pockets, the color in his cheeks just a bit higher.

The air has got a touch of snow to it, when they exit the pub.

He puts his hand to the back of Tim's head and pushes it down with a playful smile, just messing about, darlings, but how bloody fast both their hearts are going, as they saunter along much too nonchalantly to the tune of these hummingbird pulses.

Up ahead, the Bienville House opens itself with a bang, and onto the sidewalk are marched four men in employee uniform, three humans and a vampire, the former blubbering, the latter thrashing against the superior hands restraining him, his fangs out, his face black with vein, and now onto their knees they are all forced, and four swift rounds puts them facedown in leftover snow, one still kicking about just a bit until another to the back of his head halts his flailing feet at last.

He turns Tim round and begins to walk briskly back the way they've come.

"You're fine," he says quietly under his breath, putting both his hands casually in his own pockets, leaning his elbow out just a bit to knock it reassuringly against Tim's own. "Is Decatur St. mostly owned by Nik?"

"Yeah," Tim replies tightly.

Ginger Lime empties itself onto the street, to the sounds of gunshots and screams.

Against the wall of Club Decatur another three of Nik's allies are lined up and shot through the chest.

They cut down an alley, behind them a set of footsteps on business, sounding its paces briskly, matching itself to the rhythm of Tim's heart, the late sky going white before them both, Tim cutting him a look, he pushing the boy on in front of him, his hands returning once more to their assumed indifference, the melted snow underneath them wetting their shoes to the laces, the clouds overhead beginning to gather together a new layer to lay down beneath their treads.

He's very fast, but he's got only one of him.

He takes the two shots fired from the mouth of the alley with barely a flinch and turns round to give the man a boot to the face that breaks his jaw and shoots him ten feet out into the street, his shoulder crunching when he hits.

An automatic (that's quite illegal, you know, darling) coughs one long stream into the alley and he hears someone come down on top of the dumpster out back of whatever businesses they have funneled themselves between, and round he whips in time to see Tim throw himself over the lid and slide down behind it, cracking off two shots of his own as he goes.

The automatic goes the way of the man's heart, both of them sliding in ruins down the wall, and then two more leap from the roof of the building to his right and another shoots himself gracefully off the ledge of the left, his boots echoing off dumpster, touching down onto pavement, his head disappearing over the side of the rubbish bin where Tim still lurks with that bloody old-fashioned six-shooter, the eccentric  _wank_ , and then one of the two men still milling about the alley hits him like a freight train, and he loses his feet.

He's got some years behind him, because the blow carries them both into the wall at his back, and in the man sneaks two punches to the gut that rupture something inside him, blood spattering across his tongue and over his bottom lip, his brain for just a moment fuzzy with this crippling blow, and then he breaks the man's nose, punches his throat, takes his heart.

He takes one long stride that puts him chest to back with the second man as he skirts round the dumpster to aid his friend, who has had quite the fight put to him by Tim, and off the metal edge of the lid he bounces the man's face, until the corner catches his eye and he sticks there, impaled through the socket, screaming to wake the dead.

Tim gets hold of his attacker's hair, slams the man's temple down onto the dumpster, once, twice, three more times, until he has painted himself in blood and brain alike, and then still holding onto this slick red mane, he turns and shoots the screamer in the head.

He gives his last round to the teeth of the man he clutches in his white-knuckled fingers.

"You all right?"

Tim has got two holes through his vest, both of them seeping, but they're to either side of his heart, and if he's a bit knock-kneed on his feet, they've not got the time to pause and dig round for however many bits of shrapnel he's managed to collect.

He fucked Nik.

He's a trooper.

"Can you run with them in you?" he asks.

"Yeah." He puts his revolver back in his pocket. "I'm fine. You?"

He clicks the shoulder he doesn't even remember dislocating back into place. "They haven't got any white oak; I'm indestructible. Where's the nearest hotel of Nik's?"

"Not on Decatur? The Quarter House."

"All right." He yanks Tim's shirt from his trousers to briefly check his wounds, frowning down at either bullet hole, a few more superficial splinters bristling down his ribs, the whole of his stomach tinted red. "Let's see if it's clear, get you settled there, then I'll dig these out."

Another series of shots rings out from the street.

Tim flinches.

He drops the boy's shirt.

It's not exactly inconspicuous, emerging from this death-scented alleyway, both of them smeared in blood, Tim coughing up the bits of froth the bullet in his lung sends forth to his lips, but for now Marcel's groups have moved on, the sky squeezes down snow in peace, their steps are only occasionally halted by Tim bending himself at the waist to take a few careful breaths, his cheeks white.

"You're doing fantastic, darling," he soothes him along, keeping his smile playful, his voice cheerful, but it's a transparent sham, his heart puts the dupe to neither of their ears, but if Tim doesn't believe it, he at least finds some comfort in the pretense, because he smiles through the blood on his lips, and they get a nice moment to themselves, the shots and the shouts dying away somewhere behind them, this smile passed back and forth between them, his thumb coming out to very gently wipe some of the blood which has made its way in a trickle from Tim's mouth to his chin.

"Shit," Tim says, and he looks away, up the road and to the scurrying about ahead of them, distance still making an ant hive of this activity.

They both stop.

He takes his hand from Tim's chin.

The soldiers have blockaded the end of the street.

* * *

"You're such a child about these things," Rebekah scoffs beside her, smoothing a strand of hair back behind her ear.

"They're adorable, and you're a grump," she replies, leaning herself through the open window of the St. Charles streetcar and flashing her best Miss Mystic smile to the nearly-empty sidewalks, her hand spiraling its graceful parade wave, just one smooth turn of the wrist, nothing spastic, you're a goddamn princess, not a tourist, Miss Baker beat through her crown and into her skull, and if Rebekah is too freaking up her own original butt to spread a little post-holiday cheer to a city down in the sucks, well, that's what she's here for.

She grabs Rebekah's hand and flaps it awkwardly at the people they pass.

"Would you knock it off, you twit?" she snaps, yanking her hand back.

"You are a bigger Grinch than Klaus."

"It's not even Christmas anymore."

"That doesn't mean you're not still a dinky-hearted shrew whose only redeeming quality is her fabulous nails."

"It's funny how my nails are only worthy of compliments when you do them."

"I know, isn't it?" She scrunches her nose.

Rebekah rolls her eyes and looks away, but there is the faintest touch of a smile, she totally  _saw_  that, Original Bitch, don't think you have snuck past her the little handful of human you have held onto all these years.

"Ok, so, since I have a whole night free to do whatever I want, and Stefan says I am on my own, because it's either going to involve shopping or shopping, I thought we could start at Adler's and just work our way down maybe to the Chateau Tao- ooh, look, it's snowing again!"

"You have got to be kidding me, Caroline."

"I hardly ever get to see snow down here, ok? I've never been out of the south. We haven't had a winter like this in years. I know you've been, like, everywhere, and probably spent a whole year eating poor defenseless little penguins in Antarctica, but some of us are not quite so well-traveled, and we happen to get excited at any little change in the usual oh-it's-March-time-to-tackle-the-usual-to-bra-or-not-to-bra-debate-because-yeah-girls-I-get-you-need-the-support-but-ugh-boob-sweat-is-just-the-worst routine."

"Why are you so cheerful? Aren't you still fighting with Nik?"

She sticks her head out the window, turns it toward the sky, catches three snowflakes on her tongue, touches one hand to the ridiculous red poof ball on her hat with a smile.

"Yes," she says, pulling her head back inside. "But I've come to that part of the fight where I miss him more than I'm annoyed with him, so tonight when we're done shopping, I'm going to go home with you instead of back to my hotel. We just needed a break from each other for a while."

"Nik didn't. I'm pretty sure he spent your whole separation doing moody sketches of your face from every angle he can accurately remember. Which is all of them."

"Good."

"The two of you make me want to induce vomiting."

"Don't worry, one day you too will meet a murdery, egomaniacal jackass who will sweep you off your feet and carry you away to your murder-literally-forever-after."

"If the murdery, egomaniacal jackass' sister doesn't eat your vocal cords out in the midst of one of those shrill diatribes you call 'talking' but which I just refer to as justifiable homicide, and have it with a side of your heart."

"Please," she scoffs. "If you were going to eat me, you would have done it a long time ago. You kind of like me." She smiles to herself.

Rebekah sneaks a peek at her.

They exchange this little flurry of side glances that are not nearly as hostile as Rebekah's elbow in her side and her nails in Rebekah's thigh would suggest, and then they both swivel their heads around toward the street as from farther up the road there is the sudden revving of an engine, pistons screaming from the chassis, tires shrieking for purchase, smoke joining snow, Rebekah's hand shooting out to grab her wrist, her heart taking a sudden leap into her throat, the streetcar gaining the sudden perfume of nervous sweat.

"Holy crap, he is going really fast-"

"Caroline, get away from the window!" Rebekah hisses, and a yank on her arm that nearly dislocates her shoulder flings her toward the opposite side of the car half a second before the entire thing folds inward upon itself with a bang, severing the heads of riders less durable than she, the track vanishing, the limbs of nearby trees punching the windows to stars, the street firing off white sparks beneath them as streetcar and truck skid the ten feet from roadway to nearby hotel.


	2. Part Two

For a moment he just stands here feeling the snow in arctic tiptoes down his back, Tim warm against him, the soldiers bustling ahead of him, this entire night muffled in the strange silence that hangs itself on the moments between bullets.

"All right; quick decision time, mate. As everyone who is fortunate enough to have been exposed to me knows, I could fight off an entire battalion one-handed, sans both my feet. You, however, are not quite up to par at the moment, and we don't want anyone sneaking a bullet into you while I'm busy giving you a show to fuel all your fantasies for the next several nights. I could drop you here and go on ahead by myself to take care of this little blockade single-handedly, like the god that I am, leaving you potentially vulnerable to any minions wandering round. Or I could flash us both up the street right past them at approximately the speed of a very handsome jet- straight into the arms of whatever might be waiting up ahead for us. So," he says, and shrugs out of his jacket.

"What are you doing?" Tim asks, his question white against the sky.

"Tonight you'll be playing the role of that one friend who chooses to pay homage to his homosexual curiosity by getting drunk enough that he can pass off any slobbery groping as just one sip too many down the hatch. Just stare meaningfully at me and stagger a bit. You'll be just fine. Why aren't you wearing a jacket?" he asks, shoving one of Tim's arms through the sleeve of his pea coat, wrestling his hand through on the other side, adjusting the lapels artfully round his chin and closing the front round his bullet holes, the buttons sealing away his weeping stomach to give him back this air of choir boy respectability.

"Because I'm a vampire. Why are you wearing one?"

"Because it makes me look handsome." He pinches Tim's chin and gives him a smile. "Now just let your natural adoration for me come through, all right? They're not going to detain a couple of sloshed queers for long. Never know what they'll see. Try not to bleed all over my coat, darling. I'm sure it's a brand name. Elijah can tell you all about it later."

He hefts Tim's arm over his shoulder.

They test out a couple of awkward steps, until they have matched Tim's longer legs to his shorter own (the only shorter appendage, you can be assured), and then off up the road they set, Tim's stumbling much less feigned than he would prefer, his heart thunderous, the street foretelling their journey with a noisy sequence of puddles and ice, Tim's hand making a clutch for the collar of his shirt.

"You all right?" he asks, keeping his eyes straight ahead.

"Yeah," he replies shortly, but he's got that wet rattle of death in his throat, and what little his peripheral vision grants him is paler than the fine dust lying itself in a late Christmas beneath his boots.

"You're full of wood, and because it's not mine, it's not the fun kind. It's just poisoning you, is all."

"Thanks."

"Don't worry; we'll get it out. Let's just get past our friends here, spirit you over to The Quarter House, and have Dr. Mikaelson take a quick look at you. He's a proctologist, by the way."

"Don't make me laugh, you fucking caffler. I'll put my puke all over your shoes."

"I wouldn't; those are brand names too. Plus, I stole them from Elijah. I'm going to be flagellated long enough as it is, without returning them full of regurgitated Guinness." He shifts Tim's arm a little higher as he feels the boy begin to slip, slides his free arm round his waist, puts them both hip to hip, Tim's head beginning to cant itself down against his own.

The soldiers up ahead have begun to gain details, the smell of their guns sharp in his nose, the ground still crunching away beneath him, both their exhales smoking in the air.

"He all right?" one of the soldiers asks, shouldering his rifle and venturing a few steps beyond this hurdle of man and machine.

He puts a jittery edge into his voice.

Not much of a stretch for it, if you want to know a secret.

"He's just a bit drunk. We were at the Kerry, and we heard shots, or something, some screaming- I don't know what's going on, but can you please just let us through? I need to get my friend home."

"I'm going to need to see some ID."

"Right. Sure." He takes his arm from Tim's waist to fumble round in his pocket, putting himself wholeheartedly to the task of botching all his movements, his fingers shaking, his eyes giving that jumpy little blink of the newly sober, his breath nearly as rickety as Tim's.

"His too," the man prompts as he hands across his wallet at last and the soldier unfolds it with a snap to give a squint to his driver's license.

"Right. Wallet, mate?" He knocks his head gently against Tim's.

Tim slips his hand dutifully beneath the coat to dig round in his trouser pocket.

Their interrogator is joined by another, bleeding from the arm.

Tim freezes.

The man watches them both as he opens this gash a little wider with his knife, and now into the scent of snow and sky spills this fragrance that awakens his fangs.

It is not to instinct but to choice that nine hundred years of victims have seen themselves cast into the maw of death, and so with just a little steadying of his shoulders he dulls his nature on the edge of his will, but Tim- poor darling, barely a century underneath him, there is nothing of restraint in youth, it's the years that bring it round to heel, ask him not to repress what he is when he has only begun to coax it forth to the light.

But hold onto it anyway.

You see, he lost a witch.

It's one of those long stories to which the telling is relegated to 'someday', but the short of it is, darling, he lost a witch, it cut him off at the knees, he's got no more left in him.

Don't you do it to him too.

The clouds breathe a lungful of ice into the sky.

The bleeding soldier shuts his knife and stands eyeing them both, dripping onto the street.

Tim drops his head.

He digs his nails into the handful of collar he has got his fingers round.

There is a moment of noisy breath through the nostrils, the acceleration of Tim's heart in his chest, everything thumping round in them both, the boy's hunger, his terror, the soldiers looking on with interest, Tim's nails puncturing his collar to open little slits along his neck.

"I think he's going to hurl," he tells the soldiers helpfully, and then with a kidney blow from the hand he's got round the boy's back, he puts Tim on his knees with an acrid splash.

They step back to let him pour up his Guinness in noisy gouts.

"I'm sorry- he always does this. Can't hold it, don't drink it, I always tell him. You all right, darling?" he asks, bending over Tim to pat his hunched back. "None on the jacket now, there we are, darling."

"Just get him home. Stay indoors tonight," the first soldier tells him, handing back his wallet. "Do you understand? Don't be wandering around the streets. Stay put once you're inside."

"Absolutely. Come on, Timothy. Up we go." He hefts Tim onto his feet, wipes the boy's chin with his sleeve, slings his arm back over his shoulders.

They are out of ear shot when Tim vomits again.

It's a bit redder this time.

He sits down next to him to keep him company as he makes his obeisance on his hands and knees, to no porcelain god but merely a dirty street corner, everything which for the past twenty-four hours has called his stomach home redistributing itself onto the pavement.

"That blonde doesn't look nearly as tasty coming up as she did going down."

Tim shuts his eyes, a little huff that might be a laugh opening his lips.

"Up you go again," he says firmly, but he's gentle when he grips Tim beneath the armpits and he reassembles his feet beneath him.

"Kol. I think we need to stop," Tim tells him roughly.

"We need to get off the street. It's just a bit farther to The Quarter House. You can make it. Can't you?"

The sky fires another volley of hail.

He slides his hand round Tim's cheek, to give the boy something to lean into, and when he does, they both drop their foreheads forward, to hold up the other with this touch of warm skin, soft hair, his other hand coming round to very gently feel that little kick of hair just beneath the cap, and isn't it funny, that sometimes the softest touch is not mother's but monster's?

They share a breath.

"Have you got it?" he asks Tim as his knees straighten just a bit.

"I'm grand," Tim says, and he's even got a smidge of a smile for him, when he presses the boy's cap down and he ruffles it round just enough to tousle his hair.

Tim takes his last step just a few feet from The Quarter House.

He stops the collapse halfway to the street, jostles Tim face up in his arms, and then a stride and he is boot sole to door handle, startling a scream from the woman behind the front desk, the staff leaping forward to restrain him as he lays Tim right on their pretty floor, the boy black to the chin with blood, and straddles his hips.

"Get on the doors!" he snaps, reaching back to effortlessly break one of the hands that closes over his shoulder. "Marcel just sent a little murder squad up and down Decatur killing Nik's- Klaus' people, so put yourselves to better use keeping an eye on the street, while I see to my friend here."

He opens the pea coat with a jerk of his hands, scattering buttons.

Tim coughs up another clot.

"I said  _get on the doors_. Tell me if anyone's coming. Or I'll murder your whole families." He smiles as much as he is able.

He rips Tim's shirt down the middle.

There is a hot spray against his face, the struggling of Tim's heart in his ears, the lungs full of fluid, bits of organ on his lips, a touch of death already in his cheeks, and then with his fingers to the boy's sternum, he digs all the way down through skin, to bone, and cracks him wide.

Tim arches up with a scream.

He yanks the cap down from his head to stuff it between his lips.

There is another moment of thrashing consciousness, his eyes rolling, both his legs twitching as he digs in for some sort of purchase with heels that skid on the tiles, the cap barely muffling his pain, his neck muscles cording, his fingers snapping themselves against flooring that does not give way before his bones, and then a squelch and a spurt and down into sleep sags Tim as down tunnel his fingers into the mess of his chest, to extract the fragment of bullet right alongside his heart.

He shoves his hand in to the wrist, to snag another three pieces just to the left of this most dangerous sliver, peels back the ribs a little more to bare the lungs, to twist his hand just a bit deeper into this mangled pink, where lies somewhere that bit of bullet that sent his lungs so colorfully to his lips.

"You little  _shit_ ," he snaps, and he straightens with the final piece in his hand, to peg it off Tim's head hard enough to open his scalp line with a gush. "You might have mentioned one of the pieces was that close to your  _fucking_ heart."

He lifts one shaky hand to paint a jagged streak across his forehead.

It's all right, though.

His hands wet with your blood, his throat hot with something else, trembling in his fingers, pain in his heart- he's come through all this before, darling, he knows through what a man must wade to reach his far years.

He just had his feet stick a bit recently, you know?

Listen.

He doesn't want to bore you.

His story's never been the interesting one. No one tries to cut short the quest of the protagonist, isn't that right?

He just-

He curls his hand into a fist, touches it to his mouth, unfurls it into a palm, streaks one bloody thumb print along the boy's cheek.

He's tired of staying behind.

That's all.

That's his story.

"There's soldiers coming," someone blurts out from the front door.

He takes the hat gently from Tim's slack lips, and slips it back down onto his head, giving his cheek one more red caress with his thumb.

"Then keep them busy down here. And clean all this blood up," he says, pulling Tim's deadweight up into his arms as the wound in his chest begins to knit itself together.

He ducks under Tim's arm and tosses the boy over his shoulder. "I'm going to take him upstairs to one of the rooms. Now, I don't have time to compel all of you, but I suggest you keep this between you and I anyway. Almost a century of lying in a coffin has let up on my reputation a bit, so in case anyone needs a quick refresher, my name is Kol Mikaelson. I like long walks on the beach and setting people on fire. I'd love to eviscerate your children sometime."

He smiles.

He holds one hand gently against Tim's head to keep his hat in place.

There are quite a lot of slack jaws, when he mounts the first of the steps and begins his half second ascension to the second floor.

It's quite nice, actually.

He's missed that, you know?

* * *

He heaves Tim across the bed of the first third floor room he wanders into at random and shuts the door behind him.

Up go the window blinds, to give him one quick glimpse of this street full of snow and pedestrians out to thumb their noses at curfew, and then a flick of his wrist and he snaps them down once more.

He listens to the footsteps in the lobby, to all the little noises of weapon on cloth, of heartbeat put nervously to sternum bone, these little movements of throat and tongue and nerves with their salt gushes, all these counters by which time ticks, winding its way round to your bed of ash and worm.

Someone fires off a shot of laughter in the street below.

He ticks one of the blind's slats with his finger, lifts it for a moment, lets it fall.

A glance shows him Tim's healing chest, his ruined pea coat (no dry cleaner to touch that in all the city- looks like he butchered a bloody cow in it; Elijah will have his liver, but luckily he grows that back as he grows back everything save his heart), the concave lung slowly inflating itself, the good giving him a brief wet show of its tedious work as the ribs brick over it once more, the boy's cheeks one inch at a time regaining their tint.

A boot mounts the first step.

He cracks his neck.

The rasp of a safety put forward is quite a noisy thing.

He doesn't really remember that. No safety but your own common sense on the weapons with which he warred; he did not long survive the era of musket and ball, after all, and Nik might at least have treated him to one of those Lee-Enfields of the Great War whose trenches he never did get to breach-

The boot is joined by a whole troop of them, up the first step and onto the creaky second, the third tread more carefully, the fourth giving out scarcely a whisper, the silence of his own room louder than the din of theirs-

He rolls up his sleeves.

Got to give your hands something to do, when they've numbed themselves with this shot of adrenaline that leaves its taste of steel on the tongue.

He looks back over his shoulder to the bed.

The wait's the thing, darling.

Stretch itself out old as him, then comes the actual moment, over in a blink, your hands a bit redder for it, but none the change otherwise, if you're like him, with your years piled thick as the bodies steaming round you.

Another look, another twitch of his sleeve, the footsteps wandering on, the scent of guns closing in as they did from the rifle pits of Little Big Horn, gradually, nosing their way as one feels his path across a cold floor-

Tim regains his consciousness before his health.

His eyelids slither noisily, his lung in self-repair gives a flutter as his lips open for breath, the hand limp over the side of the bed twitches itself onto the covers.

He turns with his finger to his mouth.

Ireland had its years of stealth and skulk, so put yourself back in those Dublin streets with their Irish spies and British counter-spies and all amount of bloody tiptoeing round the bombs beneath coats, and not so much as a fucking  _twitch_ out of you, darling.

He ticks his eyes to the window.

Tim over the sill, bit worse for the fall, especially in that state, but the landing ought break only a couple of things while he dispenses of their admirers, then out over the ledge himself, haul the boy up by the collar, walk him out from beneath the distrustful eyes-

The boots touch on the carpet a few feet down the hall.

He eases up the blinds, puts his strength to jiggling the window open one silent inch at a time.

Lapel of the pea coat -going to owe him for this one, Timmy; you think he inflates his brother's reaction to a bit of ruined Armani?- steady the boy on his feet, sit him down hard on the ledge, one hand to his chest-

" _Fuck_ me!" he blurts with all the vehemence he can put into his smallest whisper.

They've stopped a bloody truck in the middle of the street to disgorge another unit, which sets to work with their own blockades, two of them mounting the sidewalk to wave the pedestrians back to their homes, their rifles collecting snow, helmets shiny with the moon.

Tim's heart gives an agitated gurgle and reforms the bit he took when he saved it from that bullet, and the boy hunches forward with the pain of it, holding in his vomit, his hands shaking on his knees.

They listen to the boots in the hall make their sweep of the floor, to the ones in the street take their positions on the corners, and which heart strains more against its chest, his or Tim's, he couldn't bloody tell you.

He's not sure how long they are frozen like this, his fingers still feeling Tim's mending chest, Tim's hand creeping from his own knee to Kol's, to vise round the cap until with a crack it crumbles, the boy breathing through his pain, reeking of the bile he keeps dammed behind his lips, both of them with their ears cocked to nothing that isn't the creeping of those feet just beyond, his religion resurfacing for that one emergent moment in which all man needs God-

The boots reverse themselves.

They crowd the stairs.

Tim lets up on his knee.

He waits for the boots to touch down on the ground floor, and then he leans forward to spit out this mouthful of bile, choking on it until one of his retches conjures up a second wave of Guinness and human.

"Coat and the shoes- I'm afraid I'm going to have to take that out in flesh, darling. I'm going to need it for myself, to repair whatever it is Elijah decides to do."

"Sorry," Tim gasps, sliding down off the sill to finish up his healing on his hands and knees.

He yanks the window shut, and he thought all the tenderness went out of him when the confrontation between his instinct and some woman with Mother's face ended in a strained belly, but there are soft spots yet, because he kneels down beside the boy and he slides a hand over his shoulders, to add what comfort he can to this final moment of agony.

Tim leans back against the wall, his chest shut at last, and tilts his hat down into his eyes.

He smiles and cuffs the brim.

They sit in silence for a moment, listening to the soldiers outside the window, to the volleys of ice against the hotel, to the scurrying of the employees in the lobby.

"You want to move out now?" Tim asks tiredly.

"No; we'll bunk down here for the night. Might as well keep right under their noses, where they won't think to look twice. They'll probably be shutting down several streets round Decatur, to try and keep everything contained while they hunt out the troublemakers. So unless you want me to keep kidney punching you through all the checkpoints, I think we should stay put for a bit."

Tim looks down at his hands. "I snuck my way through quite a lot of those on me own in Ireland. Except they just thought I was a Mick, when they caught me out."

"Which do you think was worse to the English, a monster or an Irishman?"

The boy gives a little smile. "No difference between them, according to the peelers. A trophy for the head of either."

Spent much of your life as an animal, haven't you?

It's not much different than the average man, who will commit any sin for his bread, who forgets what little worth holds the life of his friend, when the guns open their mouths with a roar, but to have your nose put to it and ground down into the grit- that's a bit of a jab, isn't it?

Is that what your first century taught you? That you are some accolades to be mounted on a wall? That whatever preach the posters with their motivational spiels, what's inside counts only so far as it can be strung round a trophy case?

He knocks his chin against Tim's bowed head.

"I'd pay a lot for your head," he says, leaving his chin on the boy's hat. "But I wouldn't put it on my wall. And I'd keep it attached."

"And put it facedown in your lap, I know," Tim replies with a smile in his voice.

"Did I say that, you presumptuous little shit?"

Tim's head tilts just enough for the boy to shoot him a peripheral smirk.

He returns it more softly. "Missed me, didn't you?"

You won't know how much hope he hides in that.

Once he was dead, it didn't matter, for who had a witch to tell that sometimes monsters are only boys who want their brothers, but life is a wriggly thing like that, you actually have to  _live_.

There will come a tomorrow that might perhaps swallow you whole.

There will be a death, two three, a thousand, all of them save yours, darling, and through these days and these deaths you must soldier, and what have you got to keep the smile tacked in place but a bit of denial?

"Every day, pulse of my heart," Tim tells him with a bat of his lashes, and then he laughs, and he breaks into this smile, teasing at first, then softening round the edges, until it's lost almost all of its luster, and put it instead into his eyes. "I stayed round the church for a week. I mean, I left, the first time about two hours in, because I was too afraid to just sit round in there any longer, but you weren't at the house, or the Monteleone, the pub, anyplace else I could think to check- so I went back. Slept there. Found Jesus again for a little while, because you always do, when you need him most, atheist or serial killer or fuckin'…couch-jumping scientologist." He laughs.

It's not a very funny laugh.

"And then someone said…someone said you were gone, so I went. Had me first century with everyone except you. Forgot that you can't befriend humans, because what British bullets you shrug off they lie down with forever. Tried the permanent bastards, but you know how they went too. Everything except me- that was right. You were right."

"That was very poetic."

Tim smiles and rubs his face. "Me mother fucked Yeats. Who knows but he might have been me Da, instead of some scut kicking dirt in England's eyes."

"Did she really?"

Tim's laugh is choked, he has to clear his throat, to swipe a quick arm across his eyes, to cough himself back to clarity. "No. Except on days when Mrs. Connolly was too fuckin' up her own ass for my mother's patience, met Mr. Shaw himself in one of London's fine, fine drawing rooms, oh and Wilde- rubbed elbows with him too, blah blah blah. That was before he was a sodomist, of course, deserved his fall wouldn't you say, sin like that, horrible what men are coming to these days, why not ship them all off to the army where they'll beat the buggery right out of them."

He turns his head to laugh with his cheek to Tim's cap. "Close quarter lodgings with muscular young men starved of their women- that's cured many a homosexual."

"The cure is in the cock," Tim says, and then he bursts out in a laugh verging on his drunken giggle, his entire body shaking with it.

"Timothy Patrick. What would your mother say?"

"To take to me rosary until my fingers blister with the chafe of it."

"I doubt rubbing a long string of balls is the answer."

"Never know until you try."

"And how many have you been rubbing, young man?"

"Does a girl kiss and tell, Mikaelson?"

He tips Tim's head back by the hair at the nape of his neck and for a moment he looks down at him with a smile he feels all through his cheeks, and he lets loose his grip on this kick of hair beneath the hat and strokes it instead, and with that smile of his own the boy gets off a shot or a stab or something that sticks in his chest, anyway, and you'll notice, when you let yourself live, how simultaneously this hurts and heals.

So he broke himself on the witch and he'll break himself on you, and it'll sting, worse than that, darling, if you'll recall the little impromptu surgeon's routine he performed on your ailing chest, but what's the alternative?

No, really.

He wants to know.

Tim is still smiling at him when he leans down and plants a noisy kiss on the bridge of his nose, ruffling his hair.

* * *

It's funny, the quiet.

She woke in a quiet like this.

She was dead, you see.

You wouldn't know it to look at her now, to watch her cock her head to each new sensation, smell, sight, sound, there is a whole other world layered beneath this surface stratum of distant traffic, muted voices, far-off bakeries with their vents letting off bread steam and pastry cinnamon, but you wouldn't know that either, she didn't, she felt it carefully out with her fingertips perceptive of everything and her pupils blown wide to the light, but there's this moment, and it comes before.

Mommy, she remembers thinking in this moment.

Mommy, I'm sorry.

She wasn't unselfish.

She was seventeen.

But when you bow your head to the stone and you toss your final handful and up to whatever exists in that sky above wings whichever prayer you have blown out in a spray of messy grief, it's not for them.

It's the leaving that's the easy part, Mommy, so to the left behind she makes her amends, because she died on an in-between year, it wasn't fair, she had so much more to do, but what teenaged accomplishment does not pale beside Elizabeth Anne Forbes in a heap on her little girl's bed with her nose pressed to the last bit of scent to which a pillow can cling?

But it doesn't last, this quiet.

She notices the sounds of death first.

She always does.

The final gurgles of a throat fighting its way back to what she finds so easily darts her tongue out across her lips and deepens the pit in her gut, and what mid-evening snack she last consumed has long lost its swell in her belly, and into this perfume of death, hot urine, leaking bowel, dripping blood, elongate her fangs, tingling against her lips.

Please don't tell her mother.

The sky touches a few tentative white fingers to her face through the broken window.

The woman beside her lifts a hand to the piece of glass in her throat.

She gushes a red plea down her chin.

Somewhere in the street beyond the broken truck spills its death in white clouds from the buckled hood.

A piece of hail bursts on the roof of the car like a bomb.

"Rebekah?" she whispers.

In the corner of the car, she smells someone die, shitting their way from one life to the next.

Five pairs of footsteps hit the pavement running.

What is left of the woman with the glass in her throat fights all the way down into this submission to which all humans will eventually kneel, her damp coughs breaking on her lips, her lashes full of snow, one final seizure of her willpower spurting urine down her legs, her sweat putrid, her fear nearly tangible, and God she smells so  _good_ -

The mangled car door comes away in someone's hand with a screech.

Always know she put up a fight.

When the first of them cleared the tangle of bodies near the front, gun in one hand, the other extended to seize her by the hair, to yank her up by the scalp, she thought of how scared you were to love her, that she never told you sorry, spat out of her system, now pants off, hands behind your head, and she bit him in the wrist, punched his knee, thrashed all the way up into his arms.

They bashed her head on the street, drug her halfway down the road by her curls, stomped both her legs, snapped one of her arms, but she got her nails into an eye anyway, they will not forget she was here, to her one final surge of rage the man with the gun sacrificed his testicles, and it wasn't enough, but she tried.

She always did, remember?

* * *

It's the shots that jolt her from her impermanent death.

She shakes off the bodies heaped over her in an instant, gains her feet, takes her painted red nails to the messy union of truck hood and car side, peels open this siding of steel and wood like paper come loose in her fingers, touches her one brief landing to the roof of the truck, flashes down into the snow-slick street without missing a beat.

They all drop their fangs, come at her with whatever weapon they've got to gain themselves a bit of an advantage over this thousand-year-old bitch who was eating lords before your mother rapped your first burp from your back, and without breaking her stride, sauce in her hips, flip to her hair, she backhands the first onto his knees, tears off his head, swings it by the hair into the face of his friend. The blow carries him off his feet, onto his back, and heel to the throat, hand to the chest, they're always so slippery inside, she just hates how her nails come out all ragged, caught up on the snags of sternum and rib-

The third fires point blank into her chest.

She snatches gun, hand, whatever, who cares with what she comes away, he's only an assemblage of pieces, and she puts his last bullet straight into his chest, breaks the jaw of the friend who lunges to his aid with the butt of this firearm she uppercuts into his face, back kicks the testicles of the fifth as he blurs for her back.

She matches the rest of his face to his jaw, isn't that coordinated of her, stoves in with a blow from her heel forehead, cheeks, nose, works her way down to his chest, punches his heart loose from his sternum.

She drops it on his mangled face.

The last is still clutching himself.

She smiles as she clicks her way toward him.

Silly peasants.

Murder is for ladies.

He finishes his life facedown on his ugly stump of a nose, his blood trailing away underneath him, all the way to the foot of the girl with her face smeared, her curls half-missing, her eyes open.

The worst part, she thinks, is the hat.

The stupid  _ridiculous_ bloody thing with its bit of fluff at the top all in shreds where it belongs, strewn out along the road beside Caroline's curls, cap nearly as red as girl, and the poor tattered face- it had such a nice smile, you know, lit up the whole stupid room, don't ever bloody tell the little harlot with her hands full of brothers that do not belong to her, but- she liked it.

She likes it.

Don't tell her she's got to apply her past tense in place of the present, because you've got your eyes open, they've slid down just a touch, up once more they go, and beneath chest of bullet and blood your lungs take in a mouthful of January and your eyes shutter themselves closed, fling themselves open to this evening of brittle gray moon and sputtering black clouds, your foot twitches, your hand follows course, the chest knocks back another drink of frost, so everything will  _be all right._

That's what you always say.

That's what you always  _say_ , Caroline,  _please_.

"He had the wrong bullets in his gun," Caroline Forbes rasps from her invalid's hunch, angling her broken face up into the falling snow. "They're not wood."

She nods with her lips pressed together.

"I thought I was going to die," the girl says, and then her broken face fractures further still, and she starts to cry, her arms too damaged to lift her hands in support of her face, and somehow she's on her knees next to this pile of bone and blood, and she has her chin on top of the thinned curls and her arms round the shattered shoulders, and as if Caroline weren't crying enough for the both of them, she opens herself like a bloody faucet all over the girl's head.

* * *

Rebekah sweeps in through the door with Caroline on her arm and snow in her hair.

He could smell them halfway down the block, clothed as they are in blood, the reek hardly diminished by this cannonade of winter that makes itself known at the windows and across the roof, and over the side of the chair he drops his sketchpad, his charcoal writing itself a messy doodle across the cover as it rolls for the carpet.

"What the hell happened to you?" he demands, and no sooner has he taken to his feet than Caroline leaps right up into his arms, arms round his neck, lips on his own.

He holds her by the waist as she takes his mouth in some great fever of need, kisses his cheek, his neck, the crook of his shoulder, buries her face there to just breathe against the skin she has nudged down the collar of his shirt to find.

He meets Rebekah's eyes over Caroline's head, easing her down onto her toes.

His sister holds his gaze regally with her red-rimmed eyes. "We had a small run-in with some werewolves, that's all, Nik."

"With wolves," he says, and at this Caroline looks up, back over her shoulder to his sister, who flutters her lashes just slightly but keeps her chin loftily tilted and her hands in her jacket pockets.

"Right," Caroline agrees, and she takes his cheeks in her hands and she kisses him with such earnestness he feels all the tension drain itself from his shoulders. "Wolves." She kisses him again, just a peck this time, but she does not let go his cheeks, she strokes her thumbs back along the bones, all the way to his ears and down along his jaw line.

"We took care of it," Bekah adds. "I don't think they'll be bothering us at all again."

* * *

With hair curled, lips glossed, lashes curled, she sets off to the Hotel Mazarin on a morning nearly as pretty as she.

She opens the front doors unchallenged.

Perhaps it's the bat in her hand.

Kol will never miss it; he's only a bloody  _thousand_ of the things, all stacked round like those pocket watches of Nik's, crowding their tarnished faces round the room that should well have gone to her antique looking glasses, if the dolts had any eye for class.

She snaps it between her hands.

Actually, he will miss it.

It's his favorite.

That's the whole point.

You see, dear brother, you can make your moony  _cow_ eyes at her, poor Kol the left behind, a spit rather than a squall squeezed from the eyes of sisters who ought to have gone to bended knee for their grief over an asshat and his stake, but she hasn't broken nearly enough of your prized possessions to yet spare herself a care.

"Rebekah," Marcel says with a smile that brightens his whole face, and she jerks the first of the bodyguards flanking him onto the floor, spurts his eye halfway up her calf with a stomp of her heel, pins him there screaming his bloody head off as she thrusts Kol's bat through the chest of the remaining guard.

She keeps her eyes on Marcel's as she slips her heel slowly free of the socket, and stabs down with the second half of her weapon so hard she cuts the man's head free of his neck.

She feels the warm gush of his death all round her feet.

She smiles.

Marcel steeples his fingers, his throat working. "Take it Caroline Forbes is a friend of yours?"

" _No_ ," she snaps. "But she was wearing my shirt when you had her shot."

She jerks him to his feet by the collar of his shirt. "Now why don't you show me round the hotel, Marcel? I want to meet all your favorites. You're very hungry, and they're very tasty."

* * *

Nik storms into her room not three hours later, and she casually flips a page of the magazine she is reading.

"You and Caroline were attacked by wolves."

"Isn't that what we said last night?" she asks, wetting her finger.

She turns another page.

"So last night, a dozen of my informants were murdered, Caroline herself very nearly among them, because werewolves were angry with the recent glut of hits Marcel has taken to his people, courtesy of my assassins. And this afternoon, I hear tale of a disturbance at the Hotel Mazarin perpetrated by an irate, well-dressed blonde."

She looks up with an arch of her eyebrow. "Maybe you should put a leash on her, Nik. But at least she took the time to dress up. Just because you've got to get your hands a bit dirty is no reason not to look pretty while doing it. I like to think I taught her that."

" _Rebekah_."

She flips the magazine shut. "You caught me. I lied. I just wanted to get there first."

"And who gave you  _permission_?" Nik thunders, his cheeks going that particularly lively shade of red that she does so adore putting in his face.

She smiles.

She crosses her legs. "Let's see, Nik, I'm an individual perfectly capable of governing myself and my own decisions, so- me. If you have a problem with that, then why don't you run along, borrow your testicles from Caroline, and then come back and tell me what you think of that?"

"I suppose your coffin is looking particularly inviting to you lately, hmm?"

"The Mikaelsons reunited once more, and you want to start sticking them back in boxes. Isn't that  _typical_ ," she spits. "You want your bloody unity only so long as it goes your own way and we follow your every little whim. How pleased Kol must be to have returned to you."

Nik is silent for several long moments, and though he thinks he keeps his face schooled so well, her big brother with his expressions that give away everything, she can see each little mark she has cut into him with her words.

You think she likes to watch her lash land, to see all her little insults grow themselves a cover of old white, until you can pick them away like they mean nothing, Nik?

She just wanted the same brother who sat vigil against her nightmares.

That's all, Nik.

She never thought it was too much to ask.

"Where is Kol?" he asks more quietly.

"How the hell should I know?" she snaps. "I haven't talked to him since he came back."

"He didn't come home last night. One of the members of my hit team is missing as well."

"The quiet Irish one whose eyes Caroline's going to spit on her nails one day?"

"Tim. Yes."

"Didn't he and Kol paint the town homosexual our first time round this city?" she asks carelessly, leaning back on her hands and swinging her legs in front of her, letting them thump gently back against the bed with each thrust of her knees. "They're probably holed up somewhere getting to know each other again. He's been dead a year. It's been a while, Nik."

"Or else Tim was one of last night's victims, and now our dear brother is gearing himself up for another spree like the one he inflicted on the French Quarter mere days after stepping out from the curtain for his encore."

"And what bothers you more? Kol's battered heart, or your ruined plans?"

Nik's jaw tenses.

He stares at her for a very long moment. "We haven't finished this discussion," he says darkly, and then he turns on his heel and slips down the hall in a blink.

* * *

Tim lies buried in his slumber right up till noon, but he's no clock round his neck like a noose, so what harm in letting him sigh out his dreams in a safe bed, his hand twitching over the side.

He puts his hands behind his neck, waggling his toes in his socks where they lie level with Tim's head, the sun warm on the blinds and the mild day coming round to bake away the snow, the death of it echoing on the sidewalks far below.

Tim conked himself out quite soon after their talk ended in a midnight full of silence, but he's spent much of this nighttime cease fire just precisely like this, head to toe with the boy, the frail start and stop of Tim's breathing knocking his heart round his chest, the moon and then sun nipping in through the blinds to take their rays like charcoal to his cheeks.

So he came through a war, two, three, 37,230 of them, to be exact, because that's what each day makes of itself, that first turbulent century with the knowledge of forever still a little infant thing inside your breast, and he's not a mark for it physically, because didn't he tell you, Tim O'Sullivan, that you'll never believe it, not with your friends falling dead all round you, popping out their babies and oiling up their old joints with some pint of froth and anesthesia, but you'll never change again, with time on bended knee before you.

There must be a whole different weight on the shoulders of men who have asked for it.

There must be a whole new species of mold growing in patchy on the soul, eating away with the mouths of third-world starved.

Nik promised his day of justified vengeance to a boy practically new from the thighs, he was that young, and what man still numb with his grief would weight the scales of his heart with careful consideration, to the one side endless youth, unblemished beauty, knowledge never-ending, to the other the specter of this nice young lad from Kerry going pale round the edges with his bloodlust and his boredom.

You will blunt your grief on your sleeve over that, because into what millstone has this poor boy been cast, with his guileless smile and his nose full of freckles, and his lashes nearly long as a girl's, and the cap he carried through six countries, 102 years, the right side patched against the bullet that tried at last to carry it from his head, the left with the blood of some boy who held over his own youth Ireland's emancipation, but has he not fallen under the pall of age just like all other man?

What boy keeps his rosy inexperience with a government at his back, nudging him forward into trenches of shit and snow? What girl preserves in her heart that kernel of ponytails tied up with string when she is mounted for her first time, and instead of poetry and starlight she is for thirty damp seconds robbed of her dignity and her sanctity?

Is this tragedy or inevitability?

You know, he doesn't know.

Isn't that funny?

Tim skulked round in a hotel with his mouth full of 'yes sir' and his pockets brimming with the pity of the more fortunate, who take it upon their consciences to do unto others as they'd never want done unto them (charity is for the unwashed, you know), and then, wouldn't you know it, such a tragedy, he was a very nice boy, this thing whose mouth replaced professionalism with the lives and cocks of his fellow man, the both of them equally warm.

And if this is the doing of his brother or the march of that inevitable death thing the humans for some reason call 'progress', half a million folded into the earth for the whims of papers-pushers from opposing nations, half a million more turned mad by their teeth full of blood and their toes black with December, he couldn't tell you.

He thinks it's probably a shame.

He thinks it's all probably a shame, the whole lot of them, man, monster, blundering their way round punching holes in one another.

But.

He wouldn't know about that anymore.

Probably he once kissed his mother on the cheek and he cleaned the blood of Mikael's vitriol from Nik's face just to get the ache out of their eyes.

Probably.

He watches the boy in his jumble of blankets and sheets, his bare back subtly moving, his suspenders limp over his hips, his fine hair like ash down round his ears.

There was a boy who nursed gods close to his heart and another who lost his Da to English fidelity and neither the one of them was particularly bad, no more than the next boy, but time took care of that, it always does, you'll note, and so here they lie head to toe, breathing the inhalations that should perhaps have gone to better men, probably just shells of themselves, but who can remember that far back anyway.

He rolls himself off the bed.

Tim doesn't stir.

Everything up and moving beyond the blinds, the world with its arms in a great stretch to shake off this white rust of winter's evening, the blockades still up, the soldiers moving about among shoppers with their nerves all knotted up in their shoulders.

He hears a sigh bordering on consciousness filter through Tim's nose.

He blurs round to the right of the bed and flops himself down into this tangle of covers, crushing the hat a thrashing sleeper has at some point jostled down off the headboard.

He presses his nose to Tim's.

There is another twitch of that hand over the side of the bed, a stirring in one of the legs, a flicker of lash, another breath through the nose-

"Hello," he says.

"Jesus  _Christ_!" Tim blurts, giving such a jerk he nearly tumbles himself right over the side of the bed.

"Did you know the king of hearts is the only king without a moustache on a standard playing card?"

"What?"

"Well, there's this thing some men get -you wouldn't know about it- that grows in right under their nose, because you see, Timmy, when a man's testicular region descends, he starts to become a real boy, complete with erections that don't even necessarily pertain to my naked body, and something known as facial hair. It's quite prickly, you can save your soup in it, it makes oral sex rather tickly."

"Shut up, you shit," Tim says with one arm across his eyes, his voice strained with laughter.

"I'm going to pop round your old hotel and pick up your things, just in case some enthusiastic minion is still hanging round waiting to put another bullet in you. You at least need a clean shirt before we venture out."

Tim follows him out of bed, giving his hair a good ruffle, the muscles in his stomach shifting round beneath the skin, a hip bone nudging out its peak as his trousers slip low on his waist, suspenders still dangling.

He leans in just a bit and hooks a finger just behind the top button of Tim's trousers, right up against the skin, and playfully jiggles the waistband.

You can time his flushes by the tick of your watch, the red mortification of this fair Irish boy.

"Anything particular you want me to pinch? Weapons? Clothing? Sex toys?"

"There's a .38 in the top drawer of the stand next to the bed. And one under each pillow. Oh, and me .45, underneath the mattress. A couple of tubes of gelignite under the toilet's sink…little .22 in the cushions of the couch out in the living room, and pick up me bible, would you?"

He lifts an eyebrow. "Darling, don't you think it's a bit late to turn your eye to Jesus? His forgiveness is quite stretchy, but you studied under me and Nik both, if you remember." He flicks his tongue suggestively and lets his smile go a bit wicked.

"I cut out the middle of it; it's got a little snub-nosed .38 in it." He scratches the back of his neck and hooks a thumb awkwardly in the right pocket of his trousers. "Don't look at me like that- no one stops to pester a priest with the good book under his arm. Got round most of Ireland that way, in 1919."

"Oh, I'm not judging you, darling. I'm just picturing it. I think I'm into it."

"In a roleplay sort of way?"

"I'll be the innocent choir boy who's shown the error of his heterosexual ways by the experienced older man with a tongue as talented as mine."

"I think that's a bit backwards."

He puts his hands in his pockets and tips himself forward. "Do you? I seem to remember you already being a bit sullied by the time I got my hands on you. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that you besmirched me, darling. I went into that confessional booth to acknowledge my sins and to ask forgiveness."

Tim gives a little laugh, lifting his eyebrows, his thumb hooking now in the waistband of his trousers, pulling them down just a bit more, to show off that tuft of brown just round his navel, and on any other pretty young thing freshly disheveled from the bed he'd say it was purposeful, a bit of peekaboo to jolt these hormones never far from the surface, but Tim hasn't got the slyness for that, if it's your cock he's after he'll fumble nervously round with your belt till a long kiss shuts off the anxiety in his hands and the insecurity in his eyes, and then down onto the bed you go, with his tongue in your mouth and his teeth at your neck, and if ever you've the curiosity for the unflagging Irish spirit of which long strife whispers, wrestle yourself one of these rebellious Celtic lads into bed and pin him down by the neck.

England learned its lesson quite the hard way, but his was rather enjoyable, if he says so himself.

"All right, I'm off. Don't get yourself shot while I'm gone. You want everything still in one piece," he says, and then he drops to his knees, and with both his hands on Tim's hips, he runs his tongue up from the waistband of those trousers to the hard knots of his lower abdominals.

He stands to put his lips to Tim's ear, tilting his hips forward so that they are flush against one another for just a moment. "All of it," he says, and then he nips playfully at Tim's neck with his human teeth, and he adds just a flick of his tongue, and there's that long shiver, all the way down the neck through the spine, right to his bare little toes.

He leaves Tim just as red as the day his mother spat him out from between her thighs.

* * *

He didn't kiss him good-bye, you'll notice.

Of course the thought occurred, a harlot like himself, put his tongue on anything (not anything, he has standards, it's not for coincidence that his men and his ladies are equally pretty), but he can't bed and shed this boy of the crinkly smile and the hands that soothed what Nik stung, and that quite kinks a strumpet's style.

And oh, Bonnie.

Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie.

She was very brave, little Bonnie Bennett, but then she is only a sapling, isn't she.

You have your cowardice drummed into you by the years, which forgive not a man his sacrifices, karma has not got your back, where has it been written, he often imagines the great Lady Universe demanding, that a man is owed his recompense for a good turn, and so pull in your heart a bit, darling, you don't want it chopped off by this great swinging mallet of Time, crushing all to powder.

So what you do, is you leave behind a witch braver than you who stood before French guns and laughed at an emperor's swords, because if her love is shaky at best, at least you have got the affection of a brother who cried himself to sleep beside your corpse. Perhaps Nik expresses his fondness like a jackass, perhaps Father hunted from him every kind of softness that is expected of these modern men who are to wear their exteriors hard and their hearts like marsh, but Nik wanted him back, and maybe Bonnie never wanted him at all, and you'll say he should be over it, an old man like him, who ought well to know that time runs out, love runs out, but he wanted more than a flicker of a smile not quite convinced his charms outweighed his vices.

So he ran.

It's what his family does best.

He left her to Mikael, to death, to eighteen pitiful years that are not even a handful of time's capabilities, and for that does he deserve a good-bye kiss from a pretty Irish boy like they are husbands parting for the day?

He thinks about that quite a lot.

He'll probably always think about that quite a lot.

The streets are quite lively, this time of the afternoon, everyone having their jostle for the corners that afford the best views of this new novelty of stone-faced soldier and molten-sided truck, glistening in the sun, and so he gets his shoulders bumped a few times, an elbow in his side, a careless hand on his ass (not to worry about the last, darling, the perpetrator is brunette, perhaps twenty-five, breasts out to here and legs up to there), but none so rough a handling as the one he gets from the blonde on her way up the street in the opposite direction, her designer heels ticking on the sidewalk.

"Oh- is there a fourth surviving member of the Mikaelson family? I wasn't aware," he calls out, and with a sudden squaring of her shoulders, Bekah stops, and she spins round.

She eyes him up and down, and she always did have that gaze to chop you down a good foot and a half, his sister.

The better to step on you.

"Kol."

"That is my name. Thank you for remembering."

She crosses her arms. "Well I tried to put it out of my head, but everything about you is like a gnat, dear brother."

"Well, not everything, Bekah," he says very solemnly. "My cock is actually much closer to a python. You can ask that one boyfriend of yours- what was his name again? I can't remember; it was sort of muffled by the pillow he put his face into, to stifle all his moans."

"And what was the name of that one little tramp you were crowing about to Nik? The one who spent a night with you and, realizing her mistake, turned right round and carried on a lurid, eight month affair with me?"

"'Imaginary', I think."

"You mean, like your little pocket python?" she snaps.

He smiles. "Nice to flick sword tips with you again, Bekah. I've missed your holier-than-peasant attitude."

"You can go flick your sword tip somewhere else, you ass. Or is that what you're just returning from? Nik says you're running round with that little Irish..thing again. What's it got to offer that your own family doesn't?"

"Bekah, just because he's prettier than you is no reason to be petty about your pronouns."

She stares at him for a moment, very icily, both perfectly-plucked eyebrows giving off their air of superiority, hip cocked, head tilted to the side.

She professes her judgments whole-heartedly, does Bekah. Not an inch of her in approval of your obvious inferiority.

"By the way, I broke your 1894 Slugger," she says without a twitch of those eyebrows or a shift in her gaze.

He goes very still. "What did you just say?"

"I took your 1894 Louisville Slugger, and sadly, owing to its antique value and the inability to procure another of its type, I broke it off in two vampires who I'm sure didn't appreciate it nearly as much as they should have, given the sentimental and financial value of it. Peasants these days."

"That was my favorite one, you shrill little bitch," he snaps, and her face brightens with such a smile, he's sure because to gouge a reaction from the handsomest, funniest, certainly most  _talented_ of all the Mikaelsons is always a feat, but in 1899 he hit Big Jim Colosimo in the face with it, and he never did polish off the bit of old rust that colored it all the way to the knob, and that's a bit of history you just don't get back,  _Rebekah_.

"I know." She pats his cheek with a smile. "Isn't it a shame how one's favorite toy always goes missing in this family?"

"Maybe I should find yours, break it over my knee, and then shove the pieces in your back? You'd know all about that, wouldn't you, Bekah? Stabbing people in the back, I mean."

She rolls her eyes. "I gave you one little poke and you get your panties all in a twist. You needed a bit of time off, little brother. Besides, it wasn't as though I waved a bloody white oak stake under your nose, like some people I could mention. What did you expect me to do? Sit round like Nik, sniffling over my poor, dear dead brother, who mere days before his own death tried to send me to the Other Side ahead of him?"

"Do you really think I would have killed you, Bekah?"

"You've always been an unrepentant little shit. Why do you think Nik left you daggered for so long, even after realizing that you had nothing to do with Father's appearance in New Orleans? He knew all about it, a paltry three years after he put you down for your little nap. And yet he just left you there. In fact, he never did let you out, did he- that was Elijah. He put you in your coffin because he thought you betrayed us to Mikael, and when he found out you didn't, he couldn't be bothered to right that particular wrong. Maybe because it wasn't much of a wrong after all- in fact, I always thought he regretted not having done it sooner, after the peace and quiet we enjoyed in your absence."

He's got a smile for every hurt.

It works better than you might think, for what does she do when confronted with the deepening of this dimple in his chin- not telegraph her regret with her eyes still just as lofty, not shift about on feet suddenly uncomfortable with this stance of the supercilious, she stands her ground quite nicely, Bekah, she has not a care to rest its burden on her back, she gives his cheek another pat.

"Remember that, Kol."

"What, that nobody wanted me? Takes one to know one, doesn't it, Bekah?"

She drops her smile. "Do you know how much less annoying you were dead? It's always just been the three of us anyway, really, Nik and Elijah and I. That was the way we liked it."

"I'm well aware of that, sister. You never let me forget it."

"Then stop sniffing round the house for the scraps Nik's tossing out of some misplaced sense of guilt, if he's even capable of that particular emotion."

"I'll be sure not to do that, since it irritates you so much. What's the matter, Bekah? Worried I'll elbow you off Nik's pedestal?"

"Nobody's ever put you on their pedestal, Kol," she snaps. "The novelty of you being back from the dead will wear off soon enough, and Nik will go back to stabbing you as soon as you whittle away his last nerve, which should take all of three days, if we're making generous estimates."

He stands smiling at her for a moment, his hands in his pockets, his heart somewhere in his boots.

He sets wordlessly out on his journey toward Tim's hotel, because he can play the bigger man, after all, let her get in her last precious word, his chattery little thing of a sister, he's not Nik, he hasn't the need to slip in the death stroke before his opponent's dagger finds his heart, he's got a whole ten lifetimes of carousing ahead of him, thanks to a dead witch whose tolerance for him might well have stretched farther than his own family's, but then, what competition is that?

Actually, though.

He's not that big. (Of course you know to what he does  _not_ allude, darlings, just ask Tim and the aching jaw he no doubt had to coddle till it'd got use to a mouthful like that.)

There's a minor detour prior to his final destination, and you know what they say about the journey, it's the going that's the thing, the arrival mere lace on the cake, and so on his way to the manor he finds two willing boys from a French Quarter bar that caters to this sort of thing, and into Bekah's bed they all tumble with the house empty round him as usual, and let's not broach specifics, for the faint of heart, but he leaves behind a whole lot of blood and other things besides, and he hasn't seen much of pornography, what need of a computer and an imagination when not a man or woman would refuse you, but he can tell you that the brunette had a shot like a star on him.

Pity he didn't have quite the aim.

* * *

"I'm going out with your little…hit squad, the next time they target somebody," Caroline tells him one night when he has unearthed one of his cellos thick with the powder of storage and slotted it between his knees to give the strings a tentative try with the bow, tuning them by ear as he rings each note off the rafters.

He stops.

He looks up at her from beneath his eyebrows. "Love, it's not self-defense. It's cold-blooded murder they're out there committing. Bit different from your more…righteous kills."

"Not every person I've killed has been in self-defense. And look, I know. I'm not saying I should turn into a murdery, jackass, mini-you. But I had all these plans, for college, and marriage, and babies, and I think…I think there's still a part of me that's holding onto that, storing it away for the future, but that's never going to be a thing, for someone like me. That's not how my life is going to turn out. I'm not going to have two kids and a pool and a PTA meeting every Friday, and one day that's not even going to matter to me, and neither are people, because you might be awful, but so is every other vampire who's made it out of their newborn years. Even Stefan can be really super callous when it comes to human life that's not in some way important to him or Elena. So what that means is one day…I'm going to be the same. You can't help it, right? Seeing so much mortality and never being touched by it? Death's just death. People are just bugs. That's how I'm going to think one day, right? No matter what I do. And somehow, I have to be able to live with myself."

He's not going to argue the preservation of your innocence, sweetheart, a monster like him. Time like so many of its wars will hammer it from your still bright and youthful eyes, as it snuffed out a boy who nursed his youngest brother back from fever and cried with the joy of those alert eyes and cool cheeks.

He balances the tip of his bow on the floor. "There's a werewolf we've marked next for our sights. I'll let Tim know his services will not be needed for this one."

"Ok," she says, and takes a deep breath. "How do I do it? So it's not immediately obvious that it's, you know, a vampire instead of just some random jerk face who just totally ruined his nightly walk and maybe deprived a wife and…a little baby of their family?" She catches her breath just a little.

"You shoot him in the back of the head," he says casually, tipping his head back to get the full scope of her, poor shaky little thing, his knees lolling themselves just a bit wider round the cello, the hand full of bow giving a twist to spin it like a top.

He smiles in a way that sets her heart to flight.

"Don't worry, love. I'll be right there with you."

* * *

So what she does, with him standing right alongside her as promised, is she sets against the temple of her victim the barrel of this gun he tells her is the same Mauser that punched the final hole into the head of the Irish rebel Michael Collins, and with her free hand she forces her victim to his knees by the collar of his shirt, and it's a cold night, the sky smells of snow, each of Klaus' breaths makes a little cloud in the air, and somewhere to her left is the smell of dumpster overflow and beignet topping, and if you've never murdered someone before, you'd be surprised, how much these other sensations overpower the trembling of this victim beneath your fingers and the acrid drip of urine on his leg and the incomprehensible mush of the pleas in his mouth, but that's not really what you're thinking about, it's the  _power_ of putting a man on his knees, this superior gender of better strength and faster reflexes who has nothing to fear from a little blonde thing like her, who can force his hand if he likes because what recourse does she have, her nails are pink, she never took a self-defense course in her life, screams do not foil statistics.

She read once that one in six women takes to bed a man she does not want, and she thinks, if only, as do all girls who surrender their safety to a pair of hands that do not listen, and she jerks the man's head back as roughly as she meant to handle Damon's, and she wonders-

She wonders what would her mom say; she wonders is Daddy watching; she wonders what the girl in princess heels and ballerina tutu might have gone on to do, and she pulls the trigger.

His blood sprays up a very long way.

To simultaneously cringe back and strain forward is such an awful, awful thing.

Klaus is staring at her.

Poor Caroline Forbes, who sat on a wall, who took her great fall.

She lowers the gun.

Her hand is shaking, so he takes it from her, and he slips it into the waistband of his pants, right against the small of his back, and he crouches down next to this victim of hers, to tilt the man's head with the tips of his fingers to one side, so that this exit hole she has blown is only one great eye, keeping lookout for threatening snow, and if you want to know her very worst secret, she looks at Klaus and his curls white with moonlight and his hand red with blood and she scents out every little nuance of death here in this alley black with midnight and a dead man's best years, and she wants to bear him down onto the sidewalk beside her victim, and take him until he screams.

He's not always the douche overlord of the universe, because he senses this, she knows he does, he senses everything, but he straightens without a single seductive dimple, he lets her make the first move, and oh  _God_ , she was going to be so, so good, she was going to make her amends for her mean girl trivialities and her teenaged transgressions, she was going to marry young, age well, yearn beyond her four small walls to the artwork of Paris and the sands of Egypt but stay always ensconced in her safe little box-

She pushes him up against the wall of the alley, wrestling his belt.

He undoes her jeans one-handed and yanks them down so hard he puts a tear in the left thigh.

She kicks them away.

He bites her neck with his human teeth, working his hand down her panties, two of his fingers already in her, his lips leaving her neck to take a nip at her jaw line, her chin, the corner of her mouth, his free hand coming up to cradle the back of her head, their exhales steaming in the air.

She jerks his pants and boxers down together, and presses herself against him.

He lets out a breath against her lips as she grips him in her hand and begins to work him roughly up and down, pacing her fingers to his own, the head of him nudging her clit through her panties, both of them damp, Klaus' kisses turning frenzied, her forehead lolling against his shoulder as he brings her  _right there_ , so close her toes curl painfully inside her shoes, and then he wrenches her panties to one side and he slips himself right up against her, and three strokes with the head of his slippery cock and she cries out, bunching his jacket in her fists.

He lifts her by the ass to wrap her legs around his waist and gives a thrust that puts him all the way inside, his face buried in her neck, and just three brutal pumps and she feels his orgasm trickle wetly down her thigh, but he keeps going, his fingers digging into her ass, his breath jagged against her neck, his necklaces jangling, and angled just right he hits her so completely  _perfectly_ all over again, and she grips another handful of his jacket to ride this wave, stifling her choked little cries against his shoulder, one hand pulling him up by the hair to exchange a round of sloppy kisses that leave them both breathless, Klaus' tongue fucking her nearly as hard as his pistoning hips, both of them making little noises against the others' mouth.

She sees him come before she feels the second warm spurt of it inside her, his eyes fluttering, his head dropping back against the wall, his throat stalling on the breath of sharp January he tries to swallow down into his lungs.

"Right there- stay right there," she gasps into his ear, rolling her hips furiously as he uses the leverage of his hands on her ass to pull her nearly off him and then to slide her back down, so freaking  _slowly_ , and now he forces her to this pace with his fingertips, a little smirk on his lips from what she can see of them, his head still back against the wall, his eyes half-lidded, and so she latches onto his throat with her fangs, and she drinks until he's worked up enough to pull her in so tightly she can barely breathe, his hips bruising hers, his own teeth out, his fingers sliding up to poke slits into her jacket, he grips her that hard.

He licks his blood from her lips.

She kisses the veins under his eyes.

They both come a third time, so hard she has to muffle it in his shoulder and his knees nearly drop out from beneath him.

He holds her for a long moment with his face pressed into her shoulder, his heart thundering in her ears, winter running a long finger up her spine to put a shiver all the way down to her toes.

He lets her down to go find her pants, pulling up his own and loudly doing up the buckle.

She has just barely buttoned her jeans when his arms circle her from behind and she feels his nose press up against her neck, and it's still so odd, the tenderness in this.

He doesn't even say anything.

Maybe he can't.

So she just stares at this man faceup in the ice and gray of this brisk winter evening, still leaking his most important parts, and she lets him hold her, because she was supposed to be full of light, and love, and all the things that are not present, in the hearts of things that put guns to the heads of the innocent, and yet he still wants to, freaking  _imagine_  that.

Do you think-

Do you think her mom would?

* * *

Marcel takes to his heels after her little visit, which hardly endears her to Nik, but her brother always has something else to put his eye to, so while Marcel burrows himself into New Orleans' hospitality Nik turns his attention to the soldiers and their wooden bullets while Kol makes himself scarce who the hell cares where, the ass.

She has better things to concern herself with.

She is sitting behind Nik's desk one afternoon while Caroline rifles the files, inspecting her nails, darting little looks here and there to this girl who has not a glance of attention for her, and it's been a very long time, perhaps an entire century, not counting that annoying little Gilbert twit who was surely the worst of her missteps, but she thinks she understands still how to put forth those little feelers of friendship.

Her favorite color is blue, she trembled her way through her first kiss at ten, she forced Nik with his cheeks full of embarrassment to kiss well her dolls and all their hurts.

Aren't these the things meant to be shared between girls and blankets, their communal sheets a shelter over their giggles and their confidences?

She watches Caroline read, drumming her fingers on Nik's desk, and then when there comes the moment of this pressure built too high inside her, everything straining away at the seams, she leans forward with her legs crossed and she blurts out, "My favorite color is blue," and then she holds her breath, heart still inside her, her eyes full of what she very well bloody hopes is only nonchalance.

Caroline lifts her head from the file in her hand, frowning a little.

It's a strange little look Caroline gives her, as though what can be made of this thousand-year-old girl who never got her prom, put her to the microscope and peel her slowly back, if religion has failed in offering its answers ten centuries in the making, perhaps science can be of help, because surely there must be some explanation for the third eldest of the surviving Mikaelsons and her consistent disappointments.

She'd like to know herself, actually.

So Nik didn't love her enough to not resign her to nearly a century of sleep like death, and not a one of the lovers she pleasured surely enough on her thousand count sheets stuck round for good save the ones she split open and spread round her pillows, but give this girl with hair not nearly so lovely as her own credit-

She loves Nik, after all.

There isn't a bit of leftover room, where she might squeeze herself in to stand elbow to elbow with him for once?

Caroline flips her folder closed.

She brushes a curl out of her eye, and there's a little smile on her face, maybe a bit confused, but probably just tentative, because she thinks the girl gets it, else why would she smile like that, like here is a beginning, she doesn't mind it, in fact it's actually quite nice, and then she says, "Mine too", and they both light up rather stupidly, till Nik stumbles his bloody oaf feet into the room and ruins it.

"What are you doing in here?" he demands.

"She can be in here if she wants," Caroline tells him.

"Thank you, love; I'll decide who is allowed in my own office."

"Don't take that  _tone_ with me."

"I'll take whatever tone I  _like_ , Caroline."

"What's crawled up your behind, Nik?"

He rubs a hand down his face. "Have either of you heard from Kol, or Tim?"

"Yeah, Klaus; in fact, just the other day, Tim and I were texting one another about the little muscles that stand out in your shoulders when you're on top. And debating the merits of blue vs. black on you, the first matching your eyes, and the second bringing out your soul. And Kol- you know how close he and I are."

"I could do without the sarcasm, sweetheart."

"Then don't ask a stupid question."

"Rebekah, will I be getting a slightly more helpful answer out of you?"

She twirls the strand of pearls round her neck. "How would I know where that little twit and his boyfriend have got off to? Do you know, by the way, that the other day he left two dead men and the leftovers of his whoring in my _bed_?"

"Yes, Bekah, I believe the whole of the French Quarter was made aware of that when you screeched something indiscernible and then promised to mount his head on one of your bedposts."

"That's disgusting," Caroline says, wrinkling her nose.

"That's our brother for you," she replies, putting her feet up on Nik's desk.

" _Papers_!" Caroline snaps, flapping one hand spastically at the stack she has nearly upset.

She rolls her eyes.

Nik claps his hands and leaves them pressed together. "Well, should either of you happen to run across our dynamic duo, if you could drop word that Tim's life is dependent upon his usefulness, a quality he is sorely lacking at the moment, having put himself out of touch for the last three jobs that should have gone to him. These witches and werewolves and vampires-"

"Oh my," Caroline cuts in.

They both smile at Nik's pissy expression.

"-are not going to kill themselves."

"Don't you have, like, eight hundred minions at your beck and call? Why don't you just leave him and Kol to whatever it is they're doing?"

"A.K.A., then Caroline doesn't have to see his stupid, pretty little face, and won't ruin her nails on his eyeballs."

"Ok, like I'm the only one who doesn't like him. Last week, you referred to him as 'that little Irish slut' and did this really crappy imitation of his accent. I mean, that guy on the Lucky Charms box could have done better. And he's made out of cardboard."

"Whatever my talents in accent imitation, which, by the way, are far greater than you're implying, he's annoying, and I think Nik should just eat him and be done with it."

"Right?"

"Yes, Caroline, but you dislike him because nearly a century ago he broke his virginity on Nik's…assets."

" _Yeah_."

"That's petty."

"And your reason for disliking him is because you're pure and noble-hearted and once you saw him eat a poor person?"

"No; I don't like him because he's horning in on Kol."

"That's the same thing!"

"It is not."

"Klaus, tell her that's the same thing!"

"Nik, tell her if she doesn't shut her shrill, insect-like mouth, I'm going to do it for her. With my shoe."

Caroline snorts. " _Please_. Those are Caroline Herreras. They're not going anywhere near me."

"You're right, of course, for once. I wouldn't sully a brand name in that way."

"Excuse me, ladies, are you done? I wouldn't dream of interrupting."

They both give him a look.

He points at her. "Why don't you go and patch things up with Kol and perhaps he might grace us for a moment or two with his formerly dead presence?"

"You're starting to sound like Elijah."

"You bloody well chased him off with your latest spewing of brat, which he alluded to about five days ago, the last time I saw him, and now he's taken Tim along for the ride, and you know how Kol tends to rub off on people."

"Yeah; what if Tim gets it into his head that he's entitled to his own life and shouldn't have to live under the constant threat of death by evisceration if he doesn't duck his head to every single command of yours?"

"Caroline."

She flings the folder she is still holding against his chest. "Read this. I made some changes to it."

He traps it against his chest with one hand as she lets go, his jaw tightening.

She clicks her fingers at Nik. "Excuse me, back to me. Anyway, Kol was being a jerk. And if you happen to remember, Nik, he tried to kill me right before he died. I'm not just going to go down on my knees and lick his toes."

"A 'sorry I told you to stay dead' wouldn't be out of line."

"Oh my God- did  _Klaus_   _Mikaelson_  just offer an apology as a solution to a problem?"

"Don't you and Stefan need to get your hair done, or something?" he snaps.

"That's not what I said!"

"It's close enough."

"Is that what he told you?"

"He comes dragging in here with a smile to split his face and news of some dust-up between the two of you, then he takes off for nearly a week with his Celtic security blanket in tow; I can connect the dots, sister."

"Why do you always assume the worst of me?"

"Because you're a bitch."

"Shut  _up_ , Caroline!"

"Ok, with all of the doublespeak and innuendo that goes on among this family, I just think that sometimes a little straight-up  _honesty_ is much-needed."

"Here's a bit of honesty for you, Caroline: Nik thinks you look fat in that red dress you wore the other day."

" _Rebekah_!"

"Oh my God!" Caroline snaps, snatching the folder back out of his hands to hit him with it. "Is that why you ripped it off me so fast? Oh my  _God_ , you stupid  _jerk_!"

" _Stop_ it!" he snaps, putting up his hands to ward off her blows. "Rebekah is just having herself a bit of fun at my expense, because if she's miserable, so must be the entire world."

"That's bloody  _rich_ , Nik, coming from you."

"Sorry I actually have an ass!" Caroline yells, still trying to stretch her blows past his blocks.

"Tim's isn't that big," she points out, leaning back in Nik's chair with a smile. "Actually, if I remember correctly, that was what Nik liked about it."

"I will dagger you and leave you to rot away your next three lifetimes in your coffin," he hisses, both his hands coming down on the table as he tips himself forward to give her a thrust like a knife with his eyes.

She smiles again. "Remember that time Tim didn't leave your room for nearly two days?"

"Remember the time I stabbed you and you didn't wake up for eighty-eight years?" he asks with a little flash of his dimples, his eyes like murder.

Caroline gives up on her assault and turns back to the filing cabinet with a huff.

"I'll prove what I feel for your body later, Caroline, love."

"I think I'm going to induce vomiting now."

Nik rolls his eyes. "Just keep an eye out for our brother, will you, Bekah? I have a task I thought might be conducive to a little brotherly bonding, and Elijah, though amiable to it, just isn't prone to the sort of enthusiasm I know Kol will work up for it."

"Shots contests at the local gay bar, and to the winner goes the handsomest?"

"Even better," Nik says, his smile in full blossom now, and he leans over to plant a lingering kiss on Caroline's cheek before whisking himself out the door.

* * *

Mondays are a bit slow at the Dragon's Den, though he hears there is soon to be a burlesque contest he'll need to pop round for if only he can convince Tim to lace himself into the Big Easy's frilliest corset and knickers, and so it's rather lazily he tucks himself in at the bar beside Tim, the sloth of this place getting even to him.

He itches his stubble on Tim's shoulder and takes a drink of the cocktail he is holding, something horrible, he should well have plugged his nose before downing that, because though he can give no higher accolades to the boy's choice in men (it's his thigh Tim's hand is resting on, after all), his alcohol is another matter altogether apparently.

Thought he taught you better than that, Timmy.

"What the hell is that, darling?"

Tim squints at the glass he is holding. "A 'Side Car'? I don't know what the hell's in it."

"Ass, I think."

Tim ducks his head and laughs.

"Stick with Guinness, mate." He runs his thumb over the drop on Tim's bottom lip and slips it into his mouth.

"Thought you hated the taste of it?"

"It wasn't the drink I was tasting."

Tim pulls his hat down a little lower, and he sees that he's red to the tips of his ears, and with a laugh he slings his arm round the boy's shoulders and playfully bites the lobe of his ear.

The man sitting a stool down from them leaves off his quick peripheral glances to stare openly, drink forgotten in front of him.

He runs his nose up the side of Tim's neck, then tips himself to the side to peer round the back of Tim's head at the man, licking his lips.

The man clears his throat and hunches his shoulders over his drink. "I think you should probably take that somewhere else."

"Oh, right, well- could you recommend a good hotel? I'm new to town and my friend here can't choose; he says they're all just brilliant, very sturdy beds. You know, once he actually broke a church pew underneath me, so you can imagine we'd be concerned with durable construction. Let me tell you, mate, when this man gets after it, he gets after it. He's a- what's the term? Right; I believe it's, 'lady in the streets, freak in the sheets'."

Tim has not peeped his head up, but he's obviously got enough drink in him to smooth the discomfiture of this, because he's laughing almost soundlessly, his shoulders shaking, the hand he has taken off the thigh which feels rather cold with the absence of it going to support his forehead.

The man moves.

"It's boring in here."

"Because you keep chasing off anyone who sits within ten feet of us."

"You're right, darling- that's my bad. The apathy certainly isn't, however. I suppose it's going to take something drastic to wake this crowd." He leans his elbow down on the bar and tilts his head until he's viewing Tim upside down. "Are you drunk enough yet to get up and dance?"

"Couldn't get enough in me."

"Now, that's just not true, Timothy. I've seen you step dance with the best of them to a reel or two in your time. No faster feet in all the seven continents. Although I agree you can never get enough in you. But not to worry- I like insatiability in a man." He hops down off his stool and cracks his neck. "Darling?" he calls across to the DJ at his table, turning a few heads with the sudden lift of his voice. "Have you got 'Candyman' by Christina Aguilera?"

The man gives him an odd look. "Uh, I guess, bro."

"Good; get it ready, but don't put it on till I say."

He leaps up onto the bar and holds out his arms theatrically, because if Nik has done him any good turn in either of their very long lives, it is to instill in him the absolute necessity of a bit of drama.

No sense in living a thousand years of plain vanilla moments. An entrance is like sex, after all: hit it hard and leave them remembering, and if some fool doesn't have the good taste to keep you branded for all his days in that obviously miniscule brain of his, kill everyone and have yourself a drink, darling.

Or another partner.

He once slept with two ladies who turned out to be that poisonous variety of clinger that can't leave off for so much as a day, so to his fangs they fell, and no sooner the blood licked off his lips than he found himself one of those proper older gentleman of the hat and tails, who spends his days wrestling his demons and his nights giving them free rein in back parlors full of similar sins.

He didn't have a gag reflex that one, but if he noticed no tent in his trousers, it was to no absence of arousal that could be attributed, because he flew all four inches of him proud as any holiday flag.

You don't waste your time on that nonsense, however. Maybe put his lips to your cock for another round if you're not quite done, because tip to throat is nothing to flip your hand at, but make a meal of him before further expectations are let roam, unless your inclinations slant toward twigs that haven't the bulk to start a fire.

Tim leans back on his stool.

"Patrons, your attention, please," he asks politely, waiting until all eyes are upon him. "Tim, lift your glass, darling," he says, and Tim obliges him, balancing it on his knee. "Now I want everyone to enjoy the show, no matter what happens, no matter what you see, and remember- lots of applause; I like an appreciative audience. In fact, why don't we get a round going now, just to get my enthusiasm up?"

The customers clap obediently.

"That's no good- put your backs into it," he scolds them playfully, and they send up a cheer to shake the rafters.

He squats down to swipe Tim's hat from his head. "It just won't have the same flair, if I don't have this. You understand."

"I don't understand much of what you do, Mikaelson."

"But you're still tagging along, O'Sullivan," he says, and planting a hand on either of the boy's cheeks, he leans in for one of those ridiculous kisses meant to aggravate, full of spit and talent less gumming away, both of them laughing when he breaks it, a far cry from Elijah, who in response to similar treatment broke his neck and lectured over his healing paralysis about the conduct of dinner guests at Buckingham House.

"All right," he says to the DJ as he stands, adjusting the cap on his head. "Hit it, darling."

Opening bars with their touch of swing- put your hips into that, a tip of the hat, and now as the trumpets blare, a little spin, drop down onto the bar, cross your legs, uncross them with an artistic flick, put a hand to the mouth, and down you go.

The floor is open to him, of course, as are all floors anywhere he wishes to walk, and of course he has already elaborated on the important of entrances, and so as soon as his feet touch down, he takes a running start into a flip, spins himself like a gymnast mid-air, arches neatly through two back hand springs.

The showcase of the jive is these frenzied flicks and kicks of the feet, and so as Tarzan and Jane begin their swinging of the vine he crosses his leg over behind him to tap his toe, kicks neatly out to the side, turns a beautiful one-eighty, drops himself into a backbend, one hand on the floor, the other above him, is up again and running with the calculated steps of the dancer.

He takes up his steps in front of the nearest table, his kicks on point as he flicks both arms to the side, the knife edge of his right hand taking off the head of a man watching from his booth, and now another spin and a hop carries him onto the table of a woman and the pale, hairy little thing he assumes is her significant other, and another few stomps of his heels, a side flick, a forward kick, and she slumps forward spouting from the hole his boot has just put through her throat.

He back flips off the table.

"Tim."

"No," his friend says, setting down his drink.

"Timothy," he says, dancing into the middle of the floor once more as Christina pops her cherry over this famed candyman he wouldn't mind meeting himself.

" _No_ , for Christ's sake, you fucker."

He spins, and snaps his hand out for Tim to take, his feet still perfectly in rhythm, the fingers of his free hand clicking out the beat of the song. "Everyone give him a little encouragement; he's a bit shy."

The man across from his gurgling girlfriend claps loudest of all.

Tim shakes his head, but he lets himself be pulled to his feet nevertheless.

Christina's candyman of the sugarcane lips and one stop shop sweet talks his way round to loosing those rather easy panties of hers once more, and he takes the hat from his head, gives it a little toss to weigh it, flips it the four inches up he needs to clear Tim's extra height, landing the cap at a rather rakish angle on the boy's head.

Another large arm movement chops off the head of the bigoted bar patron.

He spins Tim.

"You are drunk," he says, pointing at him as both their steps begin to mirror one another now, Tim's kicks very sharp (you see what he said about those feet of his, he's quite light on them, for such an awkward man), he dancing round him with some hip movements that he wouldn't say are obscene, but if someone perhaps of Irish descent were to see in them a suggestion of other activities and get it into his head to take him upstairs where the lights are much lower, the booths more private, he's not about to set his back full of superior years to resisting this.

Tim smiles, his hat down a little low, partially blocking his eyes.

They turn with the beat, in unison.

He leaps onto another table, snatches another head, takes a running jump off the edge and straight into Tim, who puts out his arms and catches him with enough shock that it throws off his footwork.

It makes for quite a nice finale, the head lifted in triumph, Tim holding him like a maiden fresh from her dragon.

The door swings open.

"Nik," he says, and his brother smiles very amicably.

Tim drops him.

"Having fun, are we?"

* * *

Well, well.

He clasps his hands behind his back.

Don't stop on his account, of course, he enjoys a good live performance much as the next man, and Kol has quite the skill in his step, because Elijah sees no merit in the Latin forms with their vulgar hips and mangled footwork, so of course what else had this youngest and most provocative of the Mikaelsons to do but perfect them all.

He steps forward, letting the door swing shut behind him.

Tim has a bit of drink in him, a mere pint or half a dozen of them he couldn't tell you, poor lad never did hold it well, even for a monster, but fear wipes the smile right off his face, quick as soberness, and to his pocket goes his hand, to fiddle round, he presumes, with the phone he has not answered in nearly a week.

"I assume cell signal on this side of the city is just awful," he says, taking another step under the watch of this eerily motionless audience of Kol's, the DJ lounging back behind his station to re-start this hymn to some candyman and his panty-dropping strumpet, to quote this brother of his who looks wary enough to sting him.

Truly this look is a blow, dear Kol, to one with so sensitive a soul as his.

"I lost me phone," Tim blurts out.

Tch tch.

Going to cost you, Timmy.

Let's tally up the sheet, shall we?

Insubordination.

He skirts round the bar, stoppers the drain of the sink.

Fraternization with one's fellow employees, which, color him not surprised, his brother never has counted restraint among his strengths, but he did pair the two of you for work and not play, and certainly it's none of his business, what you get up to off the clock, but a week without so much as a ring- well, that's quite a long time, now, isn't it Timmy.

He takes the bottle of half-open whiskey from the bartender with a smile, and pours it into the stopped-up sink.

And, worst of all, Tim, because no one likes a liar, mate, that little fib you just slapped down at his feet to try and mete out some of the responsibility you'd have done far better to just shoulder all your own.

He adds a fifth of vodka to the sink, tops this off with a bit of Wild Turkey, shakes in just a bit more whiskey, until this concoction lips nearly at the brim, and then with empty whiskey bottle in hand, he hops up onto the bar.

"Tim," he says, and beckons with a finger, and give the lad a bit of credit, he understands where disobedience will get him, so with hardly a hesitation he steps forward into range, and that's all he's asking for, mate, just a bit of _respect_.

He takes the boy's hat from his head and tosses it to Kol, smoothing down some of the strands he's mussed. "We wouldn't want your little hat getting all messy, now would we?"

He smiles.

"I'm very sorry about this, Tim," he says sympathetically, touching his hand to the boy's cheek.

"Nik," Kol puts in, stepping forward.

He replaces his hand with the bottle, swinging from the shoulder, really putting himself into the blow, the force of it just obliterating poor Tim's cheek, and now with a hard tug of the shirt collar that nearly comes off in his hand, he yanks Tim over the bar and plunges him face first into this basin full of alcohol.

The boy open his mouth to scream and chokes on the rush of it, so he pushes him down until the boy's nose is flush with the metal of the drain, hard enough to bend the bone, quite kind of him, really- just think of the agony if his sinuses were entirely up to snuff and not mashed about in this stew of blood and bone he has made of this finely-sculpted face, horrible as the mustard gas of that first great war's bloody trenches, he assumes.

" _Nik_."

He pulls Tim up and pats him on the back.

"You're all right, mate, just take a deep one," he reassures him, and three liquid gasps and he pushes Tim under once more, this concoction of his so red he can hardly see the boy's hair for it.

What do you think he should call it?

A Bloody Tim is far too obvious, of course.

"Nik,  _let him up_!" Kol screams.

He pulls Tim back up for air. "I really do apologize, mate, but you know I can't just let my employees go running round the town without an eye to their duties, ignoring my calls, not so much as a step round to the house for a quick check-in. You play favorites with one, and suddenly they're all clamoring for their freedom and their retirement benefits, your reputation in shambles." He waves his hand carelessly. "It's just a mess."

Wound starting to close up a bit there, it looks like, can't have that, now can we, Tim?

He splits the boy's forehead on the edge of the sink and pushes him forward for another dunking.

"Nik,  _stop_! Nik,  _please_!"

He lifts Tim up by the roots of his hair, the boy wheezing out his lungful of bourbon, his ruined nose dripping clots, his fingers gripping the sink for leverage in this backward shove he attempts against these hands far superior to him, and he appreciates that, truly he does, puts him in fond memory of those 20th century Irish who made him such a fit family with his own quite indisposed in their coffins. Always the spirit of the rebellion in those quarrelsome men not resigned to the boot.

"Just breathe, mate; you've got it. Good set of lungs on you, Timmy."

Red Russian.

No, he doesn't like that either.

Tim and Tonic.

He laughs to himself and pushes Tim back under.

He yanks him back up and puts his lips to Tim's ear. "He's not approaching you'll notice, even though he's frothing at the mouth to ride in to your rescue. He's not much for white horses, my brother, but he does have his moments of chivalry. So do you want to know why he won't step in?" He licks his lips with a smile. "He's afraid I'm going to kill you, and any wrong step on his part will tip me right over that edge from which none of us, especially you, can return." He gives the boy a friendly clap of the shoulder. "So it's just the two of us, if you'd like to, perhaps, issue an apology or anything of the sort." He cups his hand playfully round his ear. "Nothing?" He clicks his tongue. "Terrible manners on you, mate. Wonder where you picked that up?"

Down goes the boy's head again, his fingers tightening to the cracking point, those white knuckles giving way with splinters that send Kol over the bar at last, but still he keeps his distance, this brother of his who brushes off his intelligence with his flippancy, because he understands well this hierarchy of the monster, and he can assure you, mate, to the top tier forever goes this perfect union of beast and beast.

"Nik, let him the  _fuck_ up! He's done trying to flout your bloody fucking authority; let him  _go_!"

"I have a quick proposal first. We never talk anymore, you and I, so I thought a little get together between us boys, just the three of us, you, me, Elijah, would be just the thing. Nothing especially fancy, although I think you'll enjoy it, especially with the little twist I've put on it."

He grinds Tim's nose once more into the bottom of the sink, and he watches another gout of blood puff up, quite a pretty thing, really, he always had a preference for red, just such an eye-catching thing, you know, and now the boy's flailing begins to weaken as his lungs stall on their latest gulp of inebriation, his hands going slack against the sink.

"You, me, Elijah, and the NOPD's armored personnel carrier, because of course in these unsure times, you never know when something like that will come in handy. But the twist- no running in and compelling the fight out of everyone, you've got to sneak round like any old common human thief and carry it off right under the noses of New Orleans' finest."

Tim gets let up for a moment, just long enough for another two painful breaths, poor mate, got to watch whom you take for your acquaintance, and then down again he goes, screaming out the injustice of it all.

"Say you will," he says playfully.

" _Yes_ , Nik."

"Come on, little brother- where's your  _passion_?"

" _Nik_ ," Kol replies sharply, crack in his voice, panic in his eyes, and as he's not so black-hearted as you might expect, he lets loose as the last of the boy's fight leaves him, throwing his hands up with a sigh.

"All right; tough crowd."

Tim folds his knees underneath him and lets this fall drag his head free of the sink, spitting blood and booze on his way down.

"Midnight tomorrow, brother. Don't be late; you know I hate that. And Tim? I've a new task for you. Meet me at the house tomorrow evening, same time. You're going to put quite a damper on this military occupation of the humans'. Get yourself into their HQ at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel and sabotage all their supplies. You can do it however you like- burn the whole hotel down, if you see fit," he offers magnanimously.

Kol kneels beside Tim as he coughs up what sounds to be half a lung, poor lad.

"Oh, and Kol- don't put his hat back on till you've got him toweled off. Those things take just forever to dry."

He pulls the stopper on the drain.

"Merry Irishman," he blurts out suddenly, snapping his fingers.

"What?" Kol asks, wrinkling his brow up at him, the hand he has got on Tim's back assisting some of the alcohol from the boy's lungs.

"Oh, it's nothing," he says innocently, dipping his finger into the brew circling its slow death round the drain and sampling a bit of it from the drop on his nail. "Very interesting. Big hit with the under-21 crowd, I think. Packs that punch they like in a small amount. Three sheets to the wind after hardly a glass."

He smiles till his dimples deepen in his cheeks.

"Anyway, no hard feelings, I hope? Brother?"

Tim has got himself on his knees and put a bit of space between himself and Kol, which is rather a shame, but certainly to be expected, and anyway, sate your physical desires wherever you will, little brother, but your emotional requirements you ought well to be home filling with your family who misses you.

He smiles again. "Until tomorrow, then?"

* * *

Tim opts to walk himself back to The Quarter House.

He's got no argument to put forth into this rather eerie silence Tim has let spring up between them, his hat on his sopping head, never mind Nik's warning, hands in his pockets, his cheek healed cleanly, his nose once more set to its correct angle, steps brisk as he plows his way head-down through this after-work bustle of the drinking crowd out to stretch its legs.

"Nik's a prick."

"Yeah," Tim says, and then he just veers off down a shortcut between a pair of dive bars that must have seen their births sometime round the start of the city itself. "I'll be seeing myself home."

"Right."

Can't hardly blame the man, though it puts a droop in his shoulders like he's a pair of weights to them.

He never did deserve anything permanent, did he, Nik?

Except you.

He never thought he did anything that horrible.

* * *

Kol punches him promptly in the face upon his return home, and they turn his office into a veritable ring, brawling round the whole thing until all the filing cabinets are down on their faces and Elijah has to separate them out before the killing blow is struck, both his hands to their chests, his tie disheveled from this struggle he has cast himself into, his face none too pleased with it.

"I can't even have a friend, Nik?" Kol demands, and if he's not mistaken, his youngest sibling is nearly in tears, and what a poke he is given by this conscience Caroline for some reason keeps insisting is not at all a hindrance.

"Please, Kol. You've got us."

His laugh is very bitter.

"I know. Remind me again why I left death for this?"

"Kol," Elijah interjects quietly, and the youngest of them snaps himself out of his brother's steadying fingers, one hand going violently back through his hair.

" _No_ , Elijah. He's a little  _shit_. I hung round, and I watched him  _grieve_ like a real fucking  _person_ , and I spent a whole fucking  _year_ over on the Other Side thinking about this, and how I wanted to get back to him, because I missed him, because we had yet to patch up the rift  _he_ put between us when he stuck that dagger in my heart, and do you know what he was sad for, Elijah?  _Not me_ , Elijah. Not me  _fucking_ at all!" he screams, and both of them are absolutely silent at this uncharacteristic outburst, the violence of it drawing both Caroline and Rebekah to the door, eyes wide. "He was sad for himself, because he had one less bloody pawn, because dead I was out of his reach forever, I didn't belong to him anymore, so he could throw me around like the toy he doesn't give a  _shit_ about, till someone else wants it."

He swallows.

Kol's shoulders are going like a marathon runner's just feet from the tape.

"So  _piss off_ , Nik. Piss the  _fuck_ off, and have yourself a nice millennium," he spits, and then he turns round on his heel, and he shoulders his way past Bekah and Caroline before the crack in his voice can split itself into something worse.

Bekah follows him down the stairs.

Elijah slips politely past Caroline, excusing himself as he brushes her arm with his own.

She stares in at him from the doorway.

"It's not true," he says, tossing up his hands, feeling quite shrunken by her eyes, the lump in his throat blocking any further defense he hasn't the heart to put forth anyway.

"It doesn't matter," she says quietly. "That's how you made him feel."

* * *

Tim makes his prompt appearance at midnight the following evening, but Kol does not.

He tells them all, boy, Elijah, faceless what'shisname, who was to accompany Tim on his saboteur's mission, that everything is off, thank you, dismissed, everyone, and soon as they shuffle out of his office, he overturns his desk and kicks it across the room for good measure, breaking his foot with the force of the blow.

* * *

He tries his luck at Tim's former room at The Quarter House, but of course he's already shifted himself elsewhere, so for three days he has to go poking round the city, compelling his way into rooms until a search of one nets him five pistols and that Bible with its jagged center, and of course a wait in the dark is rather sinister, but it's home, for creatures like him, so here he is sitting on Tim's bed with his hands clasped when Tim lets himself in with revolver already in hand and low by his side, his smile not very hopeful, because Tim's happiest greetings always flashed his two slightly crooked front teeth, and there's nothing but stone in the boy's face now as they confront one another over this dark stretch of carpet.

He tries anyway.

It's the only thing he knows, to keep pushing forward.

It's what things old as Time do.

"I'm leaving. Thought I'd pop over to Europe for a while, dust off my Italian, maybe go see Vatican City? It's probably recovered from my last visit."

"I think you should probably go by yourself." Tim toes the door shut behind him, and slips his gun into the waistband of his trousers.

He smiles.

It's what you do, is all.

"I thought you'd probably say that. Can't blame me for trying. Have to get my trysts on the road, I guess."

"Well, good luck."

He looks down at his hands. "Do you have to talk to me like we shared a couple of beers once and then went our separate ways after an hour of casual jibber-jabber?"

"No," Tim says, and he takes a breath. "I'm talking to you like I have to."

He squints up at Tim.

"Klaus'll come after us, he thinks you're angling for some happy ending that doesn't include him. And what if it's not me he takes? I had one friend who really meant something to me. I tried to make a couple others in Ireland, but you know me, voice just stops up in me fucking throat, and there was always that line between us, and what if they crossed it, to find out that the quiet little Mick sharing elbow space in their hay loft was a buggerer and a monster, and who can say the worst of the two? No friendship for a man who wants to either fuck your good Catholic ass, or eat it."

"I was a friend?" he asks, blowing out a laugh that isn't funny.

"It's the most important part of what you were."

"I can shake Nik," he says, something that sounds a whole lot like desperation in this one choked sentence, his hands shaky with it, his throat a bloody mess right round where he stores his voice.

"I don't want to," Tim says quietly.

" _Why_?" he asks plaintively.

"Because you died and I was a long time getting over it, you fucker. And then you were here suddenly, and we just slipped right back into it, and I thought, you know, it's not true, what you said, about everything except me ending. But it will. Somewhere in Scotland or Africa or Peru we'll take another look over our shoulder and there'll be your brother, and he'll kill me or dagger you, and maybe this time I'll take off me ring and walk into the sun over it, and what fucking way to end a story is that?"

"So you'll just stay here and slave away for him?"

Tim undoes the buttons on his vest, for something to do with his hands, he knows, the awkward little shit.

"He likes useful things. And one day he'll leave this city with Caroline and Elijah and Rebekah and he'll forget about me, because it's not the first time he's done it, and that'll be it, I'll have me freedom."

He swallows and puts the squint back in his eyes, because it seems to be the only way he can face this conversation, sticky as it is in his throat and between his ribs. "What about then?"

Tim wets his lips. "What about it?"

"If Nik's off my back, if he doesn't care about yours anymore- what about then?"

"What if that's two hundred years from now?"

He lets out another painful laugh, unlacing his hands to loll them in a shrug across his knees. "I'll still be pretty, darling- what are you worried about?"

There is the barest flicker across Tim's lips.

"4014- I'll meet you in Kerry. I'm sure there's a tomb or church or something that'll still be round two centuries from now, where we can wait."

"Puicin An Chairn. It's a wedge tomb out on the Dingle Peninsula. It'll be around longer than any of us. Probably outlast the whole fuckin' planet."

"I'm going to ignore, in light of this very serious conversation, the fact that you just said 'Dingle' Peninsula."

That barest flicker turns into a real smile, and that's what he likes to see, darling.

Show it a bit longer?

It'll have to last him quite a while.

"Get out of here, you fucker," Tim says, but it's gently done.

He stands with his hands in his pockets, and they face one another with that same dark stretch of carpet between them, neither of them nudging forward a step to chip away this distance, Tim clicking away at that pocket watch in his trousers, he fiddling with the bit of lint he dredges up from his seams.

"Say good-bye the French way?"

"Au revoir."

"That's not what I meant, darling."

Tim's smile is soft but he doesn't move. "I know what you meant."

That's what he thought.

Always worth a try, though, right, mate?

"All right, but you'll at least owe me a greeting in French, two hundred years from now."

"Is that all you can think of? Laying your hands on my Hollywood body?"

"Of course not. Some parts of you are positively porn starrish; I think about those a lot, too"

Tim smiles. "Say hello to the Pope for me."

"I'll do better than that- I'll have sex with him and then tell you all about it."

"No you won't, you shallow little shit."

"Fine- I'll sleep with one of his younger, more attractive underlings while he watches and finds himself uncomfortably stirred by the whole thing, and then I'll tell you all about that. What famous star of the twenty-first century will you sleep with and tell me all about?"

"Prince Harry."

He laughs despite himself. "What, is that an Irish thing? You like them gingery?"

"It's a gold-digging whore thing. I like them rich."

"I have billions. Probably. Elijah handles the management of all the vineyards and stock market deals. I just compel and/or seduce whatever I want."

They share a smile at their own mutual wittiness, and then he breaches this distance between them and he touches his fingers to Tim's chin, just one brief flick of the stubble trying with such futility to poke its way up out of the pores, a lingering kiss pressed to the same spot, their foreheads coming together, Tim raising up his hat when the brim sticks between them, and a stroke with his thumbs along the cheeks he brings his hands round to cup and he slips past Tim, out the door, into the hall, and weep not for a life of his own choosing, darlings.

You'd be surprised how rarely those come round.


End file.
